I think coming-of-age in itself is a rather young genre, so when I say modern I generally mean 21st century.
The books I have in mind do not all fall under the category, rather they are about the discovering of "self" and just yk vibe. So
"Catcher in the Rye" (a classic)
"Charlie" Stephen Chbosky
"Dead poets society" (the movie)
"Demian" Hesse
"Maurice" Forster
- "The Great Gatsby" cause the vibes and unreliable narrator
by Designer-Draw-6930
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dandelion wine by ray bradbury is great.
All the pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Wouldn’t some of Dickens work fall under coming of age?
The Greengage Summer by Rumer Golden
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is set in the early 1900s, and written in the 1940s
If you’re thinking Bildungsroman, you want Gothe. But if you to widen it to just becoming their character, then The Epic of Gilgamesh works to a degree. Any God or demigod creation story could work. The story of Hercules would work. But for subjectivism you’re not going to find fiction of coming of age. You won’t get any sense of a developed “self” until the late 1800 early 1900s when subjectivism became popular. As well you don’t have the modern notion of childhood until that time, too. What you had was a completely different view of the individual found at birth with their station in life in existence.
Candide by Voltaire is a good example. If you want more subjectivism you could try diaries or the confessions of clergy. But yeah, coming of age IS a modern phenomenon and it is impossible for the discovery of the self to exist before the modern era. The form is itself a fantasy and has been sort of legitimized by psychologists into a universal part of development that is really just ideology. The self, the discovery of self is a modern political concept, and coming of age is modern concept developed just as stopped child labor practices. It’s a political form, an ideology about children and individualism.
I’d stick to modern ones rather than say the Iliad, which is very boring other than as a historical document. Some nice lines, but a big snooze fest by a repetitious, long-winded bore.
If you’ve never read Savage Detectives by Bolano you should. It’s like a reflection on the coming of age novel and form and art and life and a bunch of self constructed details attached to a time and place.
A portrait of an artist as a young man by whatshisname should definitely be in there, too.