Some of the world's greatest literature is devoted to expressing the joys and sorrows humans experience as they grow old. New opportunities and challenges appear: retirement, a special closeness with the family, failing health, the recognition of personal mortality, prejudice against the elderly, and grief over the losses of loved ones and places. This collection of more than 60 short stories, poems, and plays addresses these issues primarily through the works of modern American writers, including Bernard Malamud, Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Edward Albee, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. The selections represent the experience of aging from the perspective of persons of diverse color, ethnicity, and background, and are complemented by illustrator Elizabeth Layton's wry and perceptive prints.

New approaches to the topics of old age and becoming old depicted in a range of texts from modern literature.

THE OXFORD BOOK OF AGIN offers some two hundred and fifty pieces that illuminate the pleasures, pains, dreams, and triumphs of people as they strive to live out their days in a meaningful way.

Observing that people change both physically and cognitively as they age, Posner suggests that each of us has, in succession, two separate selves - younger and older - with different abilities, interests, and behaviors, an insight that helps clarify a number of issues concerning the elderly.

By adding consideration of age to that of race, gender, and class, this innovative volume seeks to show how growing older affects literary creativity and psychological development and to examine how individual writing careers begin to change in middle age.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction A New York Times Bestseller Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Winner of the WSU AOS Bonner Book Award Winner of the 2022 At Home With Growing Older Impact Award As revelatory as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson's Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we've made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that's neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy--a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself. Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author's own words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."

The various norms and values of aging that have been created by humans in the course of history have been largely ignored by gerontologists, who are thought to be more interested in the objective laws that govern science than in the subjective experiences that contribute to the aging process. This thought-provoking study belongs to the genre known as humanistic gerontology and it explores the attitudes toward aging as expressed by society. Outlining the cultural construction of old age and the social and psychological ramifications that are often imposed on the aged by external influences, it focuses on the status and treatment of old age and presents a portrait of aging in a cultural and historical perspective illuminated by diverse national literatures. Unlike any other book on the subject, this volume is an attempt to add to the body of knowledge that helps illustrate, explain, and bridge the dichotomy that still exists between the scientist and the humanist in the field of aging. The various contributors maintain a sensitivity to the continuing paradoxes associated with the aging condition and, using a historical framework, they analyze and interpret national literary conventions. This timely and incisive work examines the aging population as revealed in prominent national or regional literatures including Japan, China, South America, France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Great Britian, the United States, the Middle East, and samples from ancient Greek and Roman literature. Based on previous scholarly research, the volume provides a significant resource that deals with the universalities of the aging condition as expressed in diverse cultures and it extracts common themes and recurring images from the literature of those cultures. Perceptions of Aging in Literature will be read with interest by those engaged in gerontological research in the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities and it will be a welcome addition to all university libraries.