Collection · Curated by Alice
Coming-of-age classics
- 19
- books to download
- 1759–1923
- 164 years apart
- PDF & EPUB
- free, no sign-up
The coming-of-age novel has a shape you can recognise anywhere: someone young, usually poor or displaced, collides with the adult world and has to work out which of its rules to accept. What changes is the verdict. Dickens lets David Copperfield arrive somewhere better. Flaubert, in Sentimental Education, lets his hero arrive nowhere at all.
The seventeen books here run from Voltaire's Candide, which treats the whole idea as a joke at the expense of optimism, to Tolstoy's Childhood and Boyhood, which are almost documentary in their attention to what a child actually notices. In between are the ones most people meet first: Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables.
All are in the public domain in the United States and free to download in PDF and EPUB.
Little Women
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Anne of Green Gables
Oliver Twist
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Les Misérables
David Copperfield
Candide
Wuthering Heights
The Secret Garden
Great Expectations
Childhood
Boyhood
Emily of New Moon
Sentimental Education
Little Men
Eight Cousins