My father died when I was 17, so I understand. A quick Google search turned up quite a few entries, but you'll need to sort through them to find what you want.

Here's a source that might lead to others.

Project Competence: A 20-Year Study of Competence and Resilience
Project Competence (see Masten, in press; Masten et al., 1995, 1999) is a study of 205 Minneapolis children that was initiated more than 20 years ago at the University of Minnesota. These 114 girls and 91 boys, 27 percent of whom were minorities, were typical of children attending urban city schools at the time. Extensive information was gathered about the lives of these children, including information about their competence, the adversity they faced throughout their lives, and many family and individual qualities that might have made a difference for them. We checked in to see how things were going after seven, ten, and, currently, after 20 years.

We learned that children who succeeded in the face of adversity had more internal and external resources, particularly in the form of good thinking skills and effective parenting. Adversity did not seem to derail development unless key adaptive resources were weak, or impaired by the adversity itself. Resilient children had a great deal in common with other competent children who had no more than the normative level of stress in their lives. They were good problem solvers, able to learn and pay attention. They were close to adults in their lives who provided warmth, age-appropriate structure, and high expectations for them. They learned to follow the rules and, later, the laws of society. They were involved in activities at home, school, and in their communities. They developed close friendships and when the time came, positive romantic relationships. Not surprisingly, they had good self-esteem and felt effective.

In striking contrast to the resilient youth, children who floundered in the face of adversity faced great challenges with very few protective resources. Loaded down by adversity, without the support of close relationships with competent adults and without the good attentional skills and thinking abilities of the resilient youth, these young people developed significant problems. By adolescence, they were stress-prone, both in the sense of getting themselves into trouble and in the sense of coping poorly with stress. They reported numerous problems and had significantly lower self-esteem than their competent peers.

As youth grew older and began to work and develop romantic relationships, it became clear that success in work and in adult relationships has roots in earlier competence. Children who succeed in the developmental tasks of childhood are very likely to succeed in the new arenas of competence as they mature. Yet, it is also clear as we locate individuals for the 20-year follow-up that there are second chances in life — opportunities for people to turn their lives around. Some of the young adults who were heading down troubled roads in adolescence have taken dramatic turns to become happy and competent adults contributing to society. Military service, relocating to break ties with deviant peer groups, and making good choices in life partners are all examples of life-altering choices individuals in our study have reported to us. Such turning points have been reported by other investigators as well (Rutter, 1990; Werner, 1993; Werner and Smith, 1992).

Here's another source:

Creativity research has focused on personality traits of creative individuals (Amabile 1996). This emphasis has led to the assumptions that creativity is largely innate or immutable and creative people are distinct from noncreative people. Recently, more attention is being paid to social and environmental factors that influence creativity. Newer definitions describe creativity as the confluence of cognitive processes, knowledge, thinking style, personality, motivation, and environment over the life span (Adams-Price 1998; Sasser-Coen 1993). It is also associated with the creation of meaning and the drive for psychic wholeness ("Creativity in Later Life" 1991), a way to address and resolve dissatisfactions and improve the quality of life (Adams-Price 1998), and a "profound response to the limits and uncertainties of existence" ("Creativity in Later Life" 1991, p. 9). For some people, creativity is an adaptive, innovative response to environmental sources of distress such as early death of a parent or other family problems, misfortunes, or conflicts (Adams-Price 1998; Albert 1996), whereas in other people the coping mechanisms might be substance abuse, depression, or withdrawal (McCormick and Plugge 1997).