The Seasons of a Man's Life

In this text, Daniel J. Levinson and his colleagues published the results of a 10 year long study of the lives of American men which revolutionized our understanding of the adult life cycle. Sampling consisted 40 men who participated from various domains of modern life (10 each of academic biologists, published novelists, hourly workers in industry, and business executives, between the ages of 35 and 45) and was based on interviews (15-20 hours individually taped) that were structured by his intensive biographical method. Levinson writes that an age-linked sequence of developmental eras and periods was a surprise, and the findings of this study support a view of the human life cycle as an overlapping sequence of eras: childhood (0-22), early adulthood (17-45), late adulthood (60-85), and late late adulthood (85+). This book is a work of great value. Levinson and his multidisciplinary research group--its members drawn from sociology, social psychology, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis--have discovered and created nothing less than a psychosocial theory of human life.