The Man Who Grew Young

Infobox Book |
name = The Man Who Grew Young
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author = Daniel Quinn
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country = United States
language = English
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genre = Graphic novel
publisher =
release_date = 2001
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isbn =
preceded_by =
followed_by = After Dachau

"The Man Who Grew Young" is a graphic novel written by "Ishmael" author Daniel Quinn and illustrated by Tim Eldred. It was released in 2001.

Plot summary

"The Man Who Grew Young" opens at a funeral, but we quickly realize all is not as it seems. Rather than burying a body, the funeral involves digging it up. The corpse is taken to the hospital, comes back to life, and recovers from illness. We quickly realize that we are seeing a world in which time flows backwards - people are exhumed from their graves unconscious, come out of comas and are sick, recover, have careers, turn into children, and are reunited with their mothers. This is a world in which time has reversed itself and is flowing backwards.

This is the case for everyone except the story's main character, Adam, who goes on living for centuries without being reunited with his mother. The mystery is why this is so, and as the book goes on, the main character gets closer and closer to understanding why he has not yet grown young and "died."

Relation to Quinn's other works

This book is quite different from Quinn's other works. It is less loaded with intellectual content, and is fairly simple in its presentation and themes. Quinn does not seek to present controversial or novel ideas in this book; rather, it is a fantasy story that has a theme of human beings' connectedness with nature. Another theme of the story that IS frequently present in Quinn's other works is that human "progress" is often illusory. The story suggests that more "primitive" styles of life such as hunter-gatherer societies were happier and easier than modern existence.

The Leiber Controversy

The Man Who Grew Young is eerily similar to a 1947 Fritz Leiber story called "The Man Who Never Grew Young," which was published in The Best of Fritz Leiber as well as several other places. However, considering the fact that both stories take the idea of time flowing backward as a premise, it's not surprising that similarities should arise. For example, the clearest way to illustrate the fact that time is running "backward," is to stage a funeral scene in which a dead person is unburied and subsequently restored to life, and such a scene occurs in both stories. In both stories, people go from being adults to being children to being infants, and then return into the womb; how else could it happen? In each story there must necessarily be a distinct point in history when the arrow of time reverses itself; but that point is not the same in the two stories. Since history is repeating itself in reverse order in each story, Europeans must necessarily "evacuate" the New World and return to Europe by the year 1492.

A previous examiner of the two stories notes that "In Leiber's story, the main character's lover is an Egyptian woman named Maot. Quinn's story features two characters who appear to combine into a version of Maot: Alta, a white (?) woman, and an Egyptian woman who becomes the lover of the narrator." In fact, however, there is no "Egyptian woman who becomes the lover of the narrator" in Quinn's book. The same examiner asserts that "Egypt is a major setting for both stories." In fact, Egypt is a setting in Quinn's book for only three pages. The same examiner asserts that in Leiber's version, only the narrator and his Egyptian lover linger as other people abandon the society they live in. "In Quinn's version," this examiner says, "the narrator and the Egyptian woman are the last people left (with the exception of the two children they care for) in their ancient Egyptian society." This is completely false; in Quinn's book the protagonist (Adam Taylor) lives with NO woman in Egypt. On leaving Egypt, he travels "the length of Palestine and Syria" and circles "the shores of Asia Minor" and finally enters a land called Mesopotamia. There he meets Eve–obviously the Eve of Genesis, since "the two children they care for" are named Cain and Abel. They obviously do not live in an "ancient Egyptian society." The text of Quinn's book is explicit: Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel live in Mesopotamia, not Egypt. Quinn has stated that at the time he wrote The Man Who Grew Young he had not read (or even heard of) Leiber's story. Quinn's story does in fact go far beyond the dimensions set by Leiber's. Quinn's story continues to the "zero point" of human existence, while Leiber's story only goes as far back as ancient Egypt. While many of the scenes from Quinn's story are similar to those in Leiber's story, there are many events and scenes in Quinn's story that are not found in Leiber's.