Between 1939 and 1942, Harvard University recruited 268 of its healthiest, most promising undergraduates for a revolutionary study of the human life cycle. Vaillant, the study's director, took the measure of these men. The result was this classic, which poses fundamental questions about individual differences in confronting life's stresses.
Between 1939 and 1942, one of America's leading universities recruited 268 of its healthiest and most promising undergraduates to participate in a revolutionary new study of the human life cycle. The originators of the program, which came to be known as the Grant Study, felt that medical research was too heavily weighted in the direction of disease, and their intent was to chart the ways in which a group of promising individuals coped with their lives over the course of many years.< P>