Lonergan's 1982 play The Rennings Children focuses on the psychological problems and tensions within a family.

Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman (1949) looks at the troubled relationship between a salesman and his two sons.

J. D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, celebrated as an acute expression of the cynical adolescent zeitgeist, chronicles a teenaged boy's maturation into adulthood.

Jonathan Larson's play Rent (1996) presents eight different stories of young adults in New York City in the 1990s as they struggle to cope with poverty, drugs, and AIDS.