Novels about growing up have long been loved by ordinary readers and analyzed, sometimes with more heat than light, by scholars. This book respects the interests of ordinary readers while clarifying and frequently resolving the moral, psychological, social, and occasionally religious coming-of-age dilemmas that scholars have wrestled with. Focusing on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Dickens's David Copperfield, James's What Maisie Knew, Forster's The Longest Journey, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, and Santayana's The Last Puritan, Jeffers writes in a fresh, engaging style meant to give criticism a liveliness and even brilliance it has in recent decades often lacked.

Thomas L. Jeffers, a Yale Ph.D., teaches literature at Marquette University, and earlier taught at Cornell and Harvard, where he was a Mellon Fellow. Author of Samuel Butler Revalued (1981) and editor of The Norman Podhoretz Reader (forthcoming in 2004), he has published essays in the Yale Review, Hudson Review, Raritan, and Commentary, and is now working on the authorized biography of Norman Podhoretz.

"The best criticism offers a renewal of the experience of reading. With extraordinary critical and theoretical savvy, Jeffers helps us rediscover works we have long known, rekindling the excitement of these stories of initiation [and] growth. In modern fiction the Bildungsroman replaced the quest narrative, and Jeffers refreshes our sense of the genre, the evolving apprenticeship novel from Goethe to Santayana, the relish and splendor of these stories of the quest for the self."--Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Brave Enemies

"To come at once to my conclusion: this is a learned, interesting, and engagingly written book"--Jefferson Hunter