Just a thought: How is the coming-of-age story different from the
Bildungsroman (the formation-novel, or novel of a youth's education)? Is it?
Even in literatures other than German, the
Bildungsroman usually retained its connection to a humanistic notion of culture -- not culture as an entity, but culture as the process we might call 'cultivation.'
Bildung is not education in the contemporary, specialized sense, but the culture or self-culture of an individual.
The coming-of-age story seems to be more specifically about a marked transition from youth to adulthood (or childhood to adolescence, etc.). Maybe you can find strongly marked transitions in earlier examples of the genre, but it seems to me that this concept of coming-of-age might be a particularly 20th-century notion, and maybe specially American. Yes, one can find ritual markings of adulthood in all sorts of societies; but I wonder if as a literary phenomenon this is more specific than we might imagine. In these stories, some kind of ordeal must be overcome before the character can be an adult. In
Wilhelm Meister,
Great Expectations, or
Sentimental Education, I don't recall such transitions, especially not traumatic ones. Even if there are stages in the formation of the individual, there's no threshold that bears the weight of the novel. With Joyce (
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), there are still stages, but the history of the individual becomes more discontinuous, marked by epiphanies.
Your examples (
The Catcher in the Rye,
To Kill a Mockingbird) narrate more violent encounters between the individual and society, often organized by sexuality. Formation of the self becomes a matter of accepting this violence, or adapting to it, or understanding it. Maybe this change in literature coincides with an expansion of the idea of adolescence. At any rate, the social awkwardness of adolescence seems to be what Fitzgerald is naming in that passage from "He Thinks He's Wonderful."
One arena of violence that the individual must enter is the market.
Dickens certainly wrote about this, but I don't think he ever imagined childhood as a time when you didn't have to pay for anything. I like Fitzgerald's phrase. How American and middle-class is his economic definition of childhood, I wonder?
(By the way, it sounds like you might have run across the story in a general anthology of Fitzgerald; just in case you haven't seen it, I'll mention that there's a collection called
The Basil and Josephine Stories.)
You also asked for people's favorites. I'm probably forgetting a lot,
and if the distinction I drew is valid, then not all of these are
coming-of-age stories. But here are a few of my favorites:
- I'll mention Joyce again, though I've always loved the stories of childhood in Dubliners more than A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
- I'm in the middle of re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray.
- The Tin Drum
- Tom Jones (why not?)
- Sentimental Education
- Billy Budd (does this count?)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- The Ghost Writer, and also Goodbye, Columbus
As a representation of modern adolescence, I'm very fond of the film The 400 Blows.
A couple more of my favorites:
- Invisible Man (I don't usually think of it in this context, but why not?)
- And I recently read Memories of Peking: South Side Stories by Lin Hai-Yin (1969), a story sequence/memoir that is among other things a marvelous, subtle account of a girl's maturation.
