Journalist Gail Sheehy, 39, a splashy writer for New York magazine on such eye-catching subjects as hookers and Black Panthers, attended a New York lecture in 1973 that changed her life. Deep in personal crisis at the time and armed with a foundation grant to study genetic engineering, Sheehy heard Yale Psychologist Daniel Levinson outline his theory of adult life stages (TIME, April 28, 1975): that grownups go through life cycles and crises just as predictable as the adolescent stages outlined by Erik Erikson and the childhood stages (terrible twos, noisy nines) charted...
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