Product Review

So where are we now? Generalizing is dangerous. Call us the apathetic generation and we will become that. Say times are changing, nobody cares about prom queens and getting into the college of his choice any more—say that (because it sounds good, it indicates a trend, gives a symmetry to history) and you make a movement and a unit out of a generation unified only in its common fragmentation. If there is a reason why we are where we are, it comes from where we have been.

In An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life, Joyce Maynard, the New York Times bestselling author of Labor Day and After Her, then just an 18-year-old freshman at Yale, reflects on the culture she inherited—from Jackie Kennedy, to TV, to Women’s Lib—in what became a generation-defining essay.

Features an introduction by the author.

An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life was originally published in the New York Times Magazine, April 23, 1972.

Cover design by Adil Dara.

Photograph by Ted Croner.