Now the 11th  generation of Americans has been born; now it is starting through the fundamental phases of life. Each phase prepares for the next: The love the infant learns in his mother’s arms helps him become a loving child; puppy love introduces the adolescent to a deeper kind. So natural is the process that we assume it, yet often the transitions are difficult. Many of us falter, even fail. But just as every failure spreads to affect other lives, so does every success, and there is in fact much love in this land. On these pages are seven glimpses of today’s Americans as, in their own manner, they obey the ancient urges to share the prime intimacies of life and to send posterity into the future they will never see.

View the 1966 photo gallery.

The Seven Ages of Love The Saturday Evening Post