TIME'S 40th Man of the Year is not an individual but a generation--today's youth.

"Is it possible to paint a portrait of an entire generation?" TIME once asked. "Each generation has a million faces and a million voices. What the voices say is not necessarily what the generation believes, and what it believes is not necessarily what it will act on. Yet each generation has some features that are more significant than others; each has a quality as distinctive as a man's accent, each makes a statement to the future, each leaves behind a picture of itself."

That was written 15 years ago when we were examining the "silent" generation. Today the young are anything but silent. Americans under 25, who will soon outnumber their elders, exhibit many features, make many statements, suggest many pictures, often conflicting--they are well-educated, affluent, rebellious, responsible, pragmatic, idealistic, brave, "alienated," and hopeful. Who they are and what they stand for are the subjects under study.

Usually the Man of the Year is just that--the individual who, for good or ill, made the largest entry in the year's annals. But occasionally no one person seems to dominate current history as much as the embodiment of a group. TIME found this to be the case in 1950, during the Korean War, when the Man of the Year was neither a general nor a statesman but the American Fighting Man. It was so in 1956, when our choice was the Hungarian Freedom Fighter, who briefly and tragically rose against Soviet power, inaugurating (as we now know) a new era in Europe.

The year just past certainly did not lack individuals who stood out in many situations--Viet Nam's war, the turbulence in China, the changes in the Communist camps and in the Western alliance, the fitful attempts to build the Great Society in the U.S., the continuing adventure in space. As usual, our readers joined in the Man of the Year search; their nominations were led by the late Walt Disney and ranged in altitude from God to the devil. Yet no single earthly figure, so it seemed to the editors, bestrode the year as did the restless, questing young.

To a generation that seems to be saying, "Pay attention to us," we might well reply that indeed we do. In the past three years, TIME has run more than 150 stories on one aspect or another of youth, including covers on U.S. teenagers, on London's youthful takeover of staid English culture, on young Americans' feelings about the draft. The Essay section also examined the problem of "Not Losing One's Cool About the Young."

THESE earlier explorations, plus the editors' own experiences and intuitions about the young (everyone has plenty of those), plus a foot-high stack of reports from correspondents all over the world, formed the raw material for this week's cover story, which was written by Robert Jones and edited by Michael Demarest. The researchers were Harriet Heck and Jane Pett.

"Is it possible to paint the portrait of an entire generation?" Artist Robert Vickrey provides his own answer in his study of the four young people on the cover. None is a real person, but when one editor saw the finished picture, he remarked that the handsome youth in the foreground suggested a portrait of the artist as a young man. "Something of that might have slipped in," Vickrey allowed. As for our word portrait, it includes more faces, more facets, and greater complexities. It includes, we hope, the varied spirit of a generation that is anything but faceless. And we also hope that our men--and women--of the year will recognize themselves in it.

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