The young hero's journey to adulthood is a paradigm of American literature itself, of course, given the additional resonance of exile when that journey leads to Europe, as it does especially in Henry James and Edith Wharton, where comedy of manners is found as well. Ghosts also accompanied James Baldwin's character Sonny to Paris. The coming of age novel is a staple of the feminist literature of the 1960s and 1970s, as in Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), Erica Jong, and Margaret Atwood.

The coming of age experience for young lesbian or bisexual woman was explored earlier both in fiction and autobiography by Jill Johnston, Del Martin, and Phyllis Lyon (Lesbian/Woman, 1972), and Kate Millett, Judy Grahn, and Dorothy Allison, whose praise decorates the dust cover of Five Minutes in Heaven, and Rita Mae Brown, whose central character in Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) shares the...