Coming-of-age novels

The novel of formation follows a young hero from illusion to experience, and the reader learns along with him. The model comes from Germany, where a young man sets out to acquire a sentimental and social education, and then spreads everywhere: a London orphan, an English governess who moves into a house with secrets, a Guinean boy whom school takes away from his village, a New York adolescent expelled from his school. The genre always says the same thing: growing up means losing something.

works 10

• NovelThe Sorrows of Young WertherDie Leiden des jungen WerthersJohann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774An eighteenth-century epistolary novel in which a young man tells a friend, month after month, of a love that has nowhere to go.Literature
• NovelThe Red and the BlackLe Rouge et le NoirStendhal · 1830An ambitious carpenter's son seeks to rise in the society of the Restoration.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelOliver TwistCharles Dickens · 1838London, its workhouses and its gangs of child thieves, through the fate of an orphan.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelJane EyreCharlotte Brontë · 1847A poor orphan without beauty tells her own life, from childhood to her position as a governess.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe Adventures of Tom SawyerMark Twain · 1876The book looks at childhood from the outside, with the complicity of the adult who remembers it and the irony of one who has seen what the small town was worth.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelNiels LyhneJens Peter Jacobsen · 1880A young man wants to live without God, and the book tests this resolve at each bereavement.LiteraturePublic domain
• NarrativeMy ChildhoodДетствоMaxim Gorky · 1914First part of the author's autobiographical trilogy, serialised in 1913-1914: a childhood in the house of a dyer grandfather.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelDemianHermann Hesse · 1919A coming-of-age novel of the immediate post-war years, in which a boy torn between two worlds meets a schoolmate who believes in neither.Literature
• NovelThe Catcher in the RyeJ. D. Salinger · 1951The novel is written in the spoken language of the schoolboys of the time, rendered with an exactness that critics praised as early as 1951.Literature
• NovelThe Dark ChildL'Enfant noirCamara Laye · 1953A young Guinean, a worker by day and a student in the evening in Paris, writes the story of his childhood.Literature