One of the tropes that seems to recur with depressing regularity in the American generational cycle is the death of a prominent young male celebrity - often among the first of his cohort to achieve fame in popular culture - just at the moment when his generation is arriving into adulthood. What's more, these particular young men occupy a very specific space in the popular imagination - a kind of innocent beauty that is at once masculine and vaguely androgenous, associated with a public (and sometimes private) sexual persona that is explicitly homosexual or bisexual.

The Lost Generation of the 1920s had Rudolph Valentino (d. 1926, age 31). The Silent Generation of the 1950s, James Dean (d. 1955, age 24) . Boomers lost Jim Morrison in 1971 at age 27. For GenX, River Phoenix (d. 1993, age 23). Now the Millennials have contributed Heath Ledger. Only the Veteran Generation missed out on this trend, although they lost far more than their share of young men in World War II. The photos below demonstrate the remarkable similarity in their iconic images.

Left to right: Valentino, Dean, Morrison, Phoenix, Ledger.

There's no reasonable or scientific explanation for this recurring cylce. It's almost something out of mythology.