Robert S. Gold

There is literature for adolescents, now generally labeled “young adult” by librarians and language arts teachers. Then there is literature of adolescence, stories of growing up, coming of age, of the rite of passage. The bildungsroman often focuses on childhood and adolescence with a critical event or episode marking the transition to maturity: examples range from Great Expectations to A Separate Peace, from Little Women to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, from Huckleberry Finn to Catcher in the Rye, from Frodo Baggins to Harry Potter.

Short stories of childhood and adolescence often center around an epiphany, a moment of recognition or disillusionment, a fall from innocence. Point of Departure, edited by Robert S. Gold (Dell, 1967), is a splendid anthology of such stories. Subtitled 19 Stories of Youth and Discovery, it features titles by such well known writers as John Updike, Carson McCullars, Nadine Gordimer, Alan Sillitoe, Jesse Stuart, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Bernard Malamud, Elizabeth Enright, William Saroyan, Howard Nemerov, and eight others. I used it for many years as a basic text in a course in literature for adolescents, and I recommended it heartily for thematic units for, say, ninth or tenth graders. There are a number of similar titles now, particularly those edited by Don Gallo, but Point of Departure was unique at the time of its publication. I think it would still appeal to young readers and provide an interesting starting point for the discussion of adolescent crises.

How well I remember students’ reactions to several of the stories: surprise, puzzlement, empathy, and then, often, their own epiphany. One of my favorites is “The White Circle” by John Bell Clayton, in which Tucker confronts the bully Anvil with a hayfork and learns something important about the bully and about himself. Updike’s “A & P” is a familiar story about a young checker at a cash register who stands up to his boss. The last sentence ends, “. . . my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” His “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth,” the story of a young teacher is less well known, but equally thought-provoking. One of the most intriguing of the stories is “The Sorcerer’s Eye,” by Howard Nemerov, which is built around an allusion to the city of Nineveh as it is described in the Book of Jonah, where there were “so many persons that could not discern between their right hand and their left hand.”

In his brief introduction, Gold identifies a few recurrent themes in the stories: the effects of class distinction, the ways race and religion complicate poverty, adolescents’ responses to adult foibles, and a number of different levels of experience that are embodied in fictional stories. “Adolescence has never had a good press,” he begins, citing Socrates 2500 years ago. However, he concludes, “As any thoughtful person knows, the only safe generalization to be made about adolescence is that it’s a very trying, frequently anguished stage of life, with seemingly endless twists and variations in the ways it can be difficult.”

The nineteen stories in his anthology are well selected, each one depicting at least one of those “twists and variations.”… (más)