Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by those Who've Lived It
Files
Document Type
Book
Description
Youth, so goes the cliche, is wasted on the young; likewise, it could be said that old age today is wasted on a younger generation with no sense of the past and willfully ignorant of a wisdom accumulated by years of experience. In his latest oral history, 83-year-old Terkel asks grumpily, "With our past become so irrelevant..., is it any wonder that the young feel so disdainful of their elders?" To reclaim our lost sense of history and to renew respect for our elders, Terkel interviewed 69 individuals who have come of age in the latter part of the 20th century. The youngest is 70, the oldest, 99. Some are well known (artist Jacob Lawrence, actress Uta Hagen, economist John Kenneth Galbraith); others live out of the limelight (a farm workers' organizer, a retired bank president, a librarian). But they all cling to life tenaciously and courageously, acting as "living repositories of our past, our history.
Publication Date
1995
Publisher
New Press
City
New York
State
NY
Award
2006 Lifetime Achievement Award
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Creative Writing | History | Nonfiction
Repository Citation
Terkel , S. (1995). Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by those Who've Lived It. New York, NY: New Press.
