The Plastic Age

by Percy Marks, Matthew J. Bruccoli (Editor), R.V. Cassill (Afterword)

When The Plastic Age became a controversial best seller in 1924, Marks, according to R. V. Cassill, got hundreds of letters “applauding him for tearing the veil of hypocrisy from around the depravities of college life, berat­ing him for spoiling the game by publiciz­ing it, or seeking further specification about what really happened to clean-cut boys sent to Ivy League colleges to be perfected as gentlemen.”

 

Marks, an instructor at Brown, was fired when the book was published, not, Cassill points out in his Afterword, “because he had written a risqué and sensational book that tarnished Brown’s reputation… but because he was the sort of person who would do such a thing. (Such delicate distinctions are requi­site in institutions cherishing a reputation for academic freedom.)”

 

Plastic Age (malleable age) chronicles the college career of Hugh Carver, a youth of high Victorian ideals, low Victorian toler­ance. There are parties and pranks, football games and fraternities, and bull sessions in which students question everything from sex to suicide. The book finally is an assertion of the value of college and of moral decency.

 

This period piece will shock no one now. “For the reader of our times,” Cassill says, “the novel may seem high as game hung for half a century before the feast. So take it as camp if you will, or as a nostalgia trip if the American past seems a Disneyland where one can hide out from the intractable pres­ent. But still consider that it might be read as a Rosetta stone or as a fossil organism turned up from a not very deeply buried stratum of the persisting national agon.”

Genres: Fiction, 20th Century, Historical Fiction, Campus

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1924

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Percy Marks wanted to show a realistic portrayal of college life that encompassed the bad as well as the good. These college boys smoke, drink, gamble, and have sex often to excess. So waht you say, but this book was written in 1924 and the author was fired from his job a Brown for writing it. It's always fun to get a peep at the past through the eyes of a contemporary and this book may be dated but it also shows that some things never change: The admiration of the football team, the doubts, fears and insecurity of the undergraduate, the excessive behaviour of young college students, and, finally, the sadness that already borders on nostalgia upon graduation. Regardless how many years go by this book proves that some things never really change.

[Cassandra Yorke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a lovely time with this one - but I think that was only because I was researching college life in the 1920s. If that's your thing or if you're researching, it's a lot of fun. But if you don't really have any special interest in the period, then you're not gonna get anything out of this book at all. I find it hard to imagine reading this if I were a complete stranger to the subject material.

And I found the ending a bit sad. It's not a tear-jerker or anything, but there's something about books from the 1920s, I've found - there's a wistful sort of sadness in them. Incomplete endings, and the protagonist never finds the object of his or her quest. The Plastic Age definitely ends that way - not quite Gatsby-esque, but similar.

But if you don't get sad easily, and you have a reason to be invested, you'll have fun.

And if you're researching the 1920s - language, music, culture, whatever - this book is absolutely essential.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Plastic Age has stowed away into modern memory on the edges of two more famous stories—the one that will pass out of my review after this sentence is that its film adaptation marked one of the first appearances of Clara Bow, the "It" girl. The other is that it was the bestselling middlebrow transmutation of campus-novel material that had first appeared in public in F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut, This Side of Paradise. (The "Lost American Fiction" edition I'm reviewing here was actually part of a series curated in the 1980s by the great Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli.)

The path the material traveled is one that's actually easiest to see when you're in college—you, the Cool 19-Year-Old in (let's say for no reason) 2006, are exposed to some cultural innovation, let's say for no reason the cringing but still earnest comedy of the US adaptation of The Office (season 2, of course, before anybody watched). This is New and Important; it is more honest, more real than the forms that came before it. Time passes, and people seem to agree with you. You have the brief wonderful sense of being a prophet of a new order.

Time passes, and people agree with you too much. It turns out that the new thing can and must (like the last new thing) be turned to ends you don't like to become more broadly popular. Plus, and anyway, you are kind of sick of it. It is too earnest. People are saying "I mustache you a question." Why are all the characters in The Office friends now? Do they have lives outside of work? You're certain they did before.

This Side of Paradise in 1920 was written by and for posing but serious young collegians. When you read it as a posing and serious young collegian in—well, in 2006, at least—in 2006 you recognize yourself in it, even if the raw material (petting, fully amateur athletics, Princeton dining clubs) is totally foreign. It was (as Fitzgerald predicted) read by debutantes and college men who understood it as both factually and aspirationally true and made him famous overnight.

The Plastic Age in 1924 was written by a very serious-minded, youngish professor who wanted to write about the average college student, and how he experienced the hothouse environment he'd seen (and that novels like TSOP dramatized). In its particulars it seems like an accurate rendering of life at an Ivy in the 1920s, and it doesn't shy away from the sensational any more than Fitzgerald did. There's the thrumming pseudo-demoniacal fears of premarital sex (not just shared by but created by the college boys!), the late-night bull sessions about God and money, the singing parties caroling across the campus, the riffing at the silent comedies.

But it's clearly for people who are not currently at an Ivy, and for people who never were. Marks's explicit goal was to write about that average student and not Fitzgerald's handsome aesthete, and so his hero is nearly transparent, athletic and doubting and charming but not too much of anything in particular. He experiences everything, but it's not clear what he wants or why people want him. (The heroes of the Fitzgerald-inflected campus novel are generally very conservative, despite the reputations of their novels—sex is chasing them down, the loss of faith is a catastrophe, and so the things that happen in a campus novel are freighted with special meaning.) At the end he is disappointed, but it's not clear why or what about. Marks himself became a novelist after the controversy surrounding this novel cost him his teaching job, but his real passion was reforming academic life in a way that The Plastic Age sometimes telegraphs. (Two years later he wrote a nonfiction book along these lines called Which Way Parnassus?)

The Plastic Age is not a very effective novel, but if you want to live on a 1920s college campus for a moment it's a great historical log of slang, fads, and daily life among the people who read This Side of Paradise.

[Gail Brassard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this because I know the film with Clara Bow--and I'm interested in stories about contemporary life--written in a time not my own. As a document of college life in the 1920s, this one fits the bill. As research for a costume designer/visual artist, it is quite useful as one really has an insider's view on the social mores/thinking of the times. As a great piece of literature..not even close.

[Nicole C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of a fictional college just after the first world war. The tale follows Hugh, an unassuming boy from the country, through his four years at Sanford. The parties, the drinking, trying to keep straight and pure. Some outdated notions, but some things remain the same - nostalgia for one's past, the uncertainty of life after graduation, the occasional feelings of despair and wondering what it all means . . .

[Carol Tilley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story was less interesting to me than the description of 1920s college life, which I found eerily like 2018 college life. I can certainly see why this book was considered scandalous, although it's quite tame by current standards.

[Susan Molloy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shaping Malleable Lives in a Plastic Age.

🖊 This is a surprisingly good novel, and my research shows that it was made twice into movies – first in 1925 under the title of “The Plastic Age,” and a second time in 1928 entitled, “Red Lips.” See my notes below.

This book does have some strong language and cursing (mostly taking God’s name in vain). Moreover, there are scenes of strange sex and casual sex, and the scenes are written well so as not to be absolutely graphic, but rather, described with consideration to the reader without going overboard or blatantly pornographic.

The story follows the years in the early 1920s that Hugh Carver spends at Sanford College, and the numerous people he meets and develops relationships with along the way. We see him start out as a naïve eighteen-year-old and end up wiser and more mature than we perhaps expected. Drinking is one of the pastimes at parties, petting is taken oh-so casually, smoking is rampant, venereal disease is a given, and homesickness is expected. The professors run the gambit between authoritarians and liberals.

While he is in college, Hugh meets up with his roommate, Carl, a conceited, know-it-all chap who seems to know the score of life and works the system as he sees fit, but time changes his goals, and he leaves college to live the good life with the millions his father left him and his mother. Hugh, on the other hand, continues his education. He and his girlfriend, Janet, break up, he meets another girl, drops her like a wet fish, then finds yet another girl, Cynthia, who he thinks he loves. At a drunken prom, Cynthia has the sense to stop herself and Hugh from going all the way – no premarital sex! – and from there confusion abounds until their maturity grows.

Overall, this is a fast-reading novel, the language is strong as I wrote above, the topics covered are fairly tastefully described but embarrassing, and probably not much has changed in college life since. I don’t know since I did not participate in parties and debauchery in college. I was there to earn my degrees, not participate in craziness.

I would recommend this book for those readers who want another look at college life in the 1920s, but for those over the age of 18.

📕Published: 1924
જ⁀🟢 E-book version on Project Gutenburg.
જ⁀🟣 Kindle.

🎥 1925 movie version with Donald Keith, Clara Bow, Clark Gable, Gilbert Roland, Carole Lombard, and Janet Gaynor. This film survives.
🎥 1928 movie version with Buddy Rogers, Marion Nixon, Hugh Trevor, and Andy Devine. Considered a lost film.

From My Desk in My Private Library at Crystal Lake:
I read this novel in two days.

✧⋆Excerpts of note:

✯ Carl

🔺 "Sure have. The album of hearts I've broken. When I've kissed a girl twice I make her give me her picture. I've forgotten the names of some of these janes. I collected ten at Bar Harbor this summer and three at Christmas Cove. Say, this kid—" he fished through a pile of pictures—"was the hottest little devil I ever met." He passed to Hugh a cabinet photograph of a standard flapper. "Pet? My God!" He cast his eyes ceilingward ecstatically.

✯ Hugh, as he registers for classes.

🔻 "Carver, sir. Hugh Carver." The adviser, Professor Kane, glanced at some notes. "Oh, yes, from Merrytown High School, fully accredited. Are you taking an A. B. or a B. S.?" "I—I don't know." "You have to have one year of college Latin for a B. S. and at least two years of Greek besides for an A. B."

✯ Mayhem at the show.

🔺 No sooner were the girls seated than there was a scramble in one corner, an excited scuffling of feet. "I've got it!" a boy screamed. He stood on his chair and held up a live mouse by its tail. There was a shout of applause and then—"Play catch!" The boy dropped the writhing mouse into a peanut bag, screwed the open end tight-closed, and then threw the bag far across the room. Another boy caught it and threw it, this time over the girls' heads. They screamed and jumped upon their chairs, holding their skirts, and dancing up and down in assumed terror.

✯ At chapel.

🔻 President Culver in cap and gown, his purple hood falling over his shoulders, entered followed by his faculty, also gowned and hooded. The students rose and remained standing until the president and faculty were seated. The organ sounded a final chord, and then the college chaplain rose and prayed—very badly.

✯ Hazing at the college.

🔺 One freshman, however, found those two weeks harrowing. That was Merton Billings, the fat man of the class. Day after day he was captured by the sophomores and commanded to dance. He was an earnest youth and entirely without a sense of humor. Dancing to him was not only hard work but downright wicked. He was a member of the Epworth League, and he took his membership seriously.

✯ A prostitute with five gold teeth, and the boys are blotto!

🔻 "Let's pick them up," Carl whispered loudly. "Shure," and Hugh started unsteadily to increase his pace. The girls were professional prostitutes who visited Hastings twice a year "to get the Sanford trade." They were crude specimens, revealing their profession to the most casual observer. If Hugh had been sober they would have sickened him, but he wasn't sober; he was joyously drunk and the girls looked very desirable. "Hello, girls," Carl said expansively, taking hold of one girl's arm. "Busy?" "Bish-bishy?" Hugh repeated valiantly. The older "girl" smiled, revealing five gold teeth.

✯ Cynthia is frank.

🔺 Why, Hugh, we're strangers. I've realized that while you've been talking. We don't know each other, not a bit.

[Aery Inking · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Plastic Age can be read as an exposé on the moral failings of undergraduates in Jazz Age New England, as described through the four-year experience of a young man at the fictional Sanford College. Students enroll at Sanford to “acquire culture,” and do so at an age when they are “plastic” in the sense that they are changeable and meant to be transformed by the experience.

But, not all of the lessons of a college education are in the curriculum. To a student reader of the 1920s, Marks novel would have looked more like a moral tale, critique, and guide to navigating the challenges, pitfalls, and possibilities of higher education. Marks was an English instructor at Brown University at the time of publication but also had experience teaching at MIT and Dartmouth from which to draw his descriptions of campus life.

The book was popular, the second best selling novel of 1924. It inspired two motion pictures. But it was also controversial. The novel was banned in Boston and Marks was removed from his teaching position at Brown the next year. College administrators saw the novel’s setting as a thinly-veiled version of their own school and the novel’s portrayal of college life hit too close to home.

A Sanford English instructor seems to convey the author’s view when he says:

“Some day, perhaps, our administrative officers will be true educators; … our faculties will be wise men really fitted to teach; … our students will be really students, eager to learn, honest searchers after beauty and truth.”

But what Marks sees instead are uninspired teaching and advising, superficial learning, pervasive smoking, prohibition-era drinking, vice, gambling, billiards, institutionalized hazing, excessive conformity, and a campus life that molds its students into less serious people. The author seeks elevation but sees regression.

Some of the norms and expectations of the 1920s may seem dated to the modern reader, but important themes endure. Marks went on to write 19 additional books and late in his career, returned to teaching literature at the University of Connecticut.
------
Read for production of e-book, available at
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/per...

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a rather wistful look at college life, written when Marks was a professor in his early thirties, not so many years removed from his own experience as a young student navigating the beginnings of adulthood on campus. I first read this when I was around the same age as Marks when he wrote it, and I found myself nostalgically transported to my undergraduate days with all their uncertainty, excitement, and novelty. Perhaps a few things had changed from 1924 to my time, but the essence of college life remained remarkably the same. Although the novel did feature a bit of heavy-handed moralizing (and a peculiar deus ex machina when the protagonist is saved from scandal by a repentant senior), this book really resonated with me.

I should note that while the cinematic adaptation (Wesley Ruggles, 1925) is a fun romance that I had watched previous to reading the novel, it really bears no resemblance to anything in the book past the general setting and character names.

[Ace · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked it so much! it delivers everything you'd want from jazz age collegiate fiction. it perfectly captures that liminal space between adolescence and adulthood when everything feels thrilling and uncertain. and i think the author excels at channeling the mindset of a young man on the cusp of life: the moral confusion, emotional volatility, and desperate attempt to forge an identity before the real world intrudes. there were times i felt both irritation and sympathy for hugh so that makes him as realistic a protagonist as any, and the book does a good job evoking genuine nostalgia not just for the era but for that particular moment of youth when all possibilities seem open. this was a good comfort read.

[Meadhbh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really don't know why I enjoyed this text.

It tells the story of a young man from a small town going away to college. But it's the complete opposite of Catcher in the Rye -- Hugh Carter (the protagonist) is a good student and all 'round nice kid. We read of the horrible depravities of smoking, drinking and premarital sex. But it's sort of the opposite of The Great Gatsby, even the "fallen youth" it describes seem to be no more menacing than Jughead and Archie.

No one will mistake this book for National Lampoon's Animal House.

It's a pleasant, well written jaunt through mid-1920's nostalgia.

[Johnny Bennett · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Plastic Age was a bestseller in the 1920s. The story is a coming of age from high school through college. There are amazing parallels between the depravity of the college campus portrayed here in the 1920s and what is perceived as the depravity of the college campus in the 2020s. In the end, one has to wonder why this was written. The narrative is compelling to a certain degree, but drawing conclusions on what was being conveyed by the author is difficult.

Mild language, bigoted 1920s pejoratives, and some extremely mild lewd scenes.

[Donna-Jo Webster · Rating 3 out of 5]

Young man goes off to college and learns to smoke, drink, gamble, and go to "petting parties." By senior year he starts to question the right and wrong of everything he knows. Wonderful "slice of life" novel from the early 1920s. The film (available in a horribly blotchy, pixelated print on YouTube) doesn't follow the book very closely at all. Obtained via interlibrary loan from Monmouth College, Guggenheim Memorial Library, West Long Branch, NJ.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Worth reading just as a historical artifact. This writer is no Fitzgerald, but it's a valuable freeze-frame of his era and it does have its great moments. It doesn't really work as a novel, but it's cool to see what campus life was like in the early 20's. Honestly, not that different!

[Samantha Glasser]

The Plastic Age was filmed in 1925 starring Clara Bow and Donald Keith.

This book is available to read online for free through Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16532/...

[Jennifer Booth · Rating 1 out of 5]

It felt shallow.

When I heard this was a silent film at one time. The laungue was too strong for its time. I felt like was a bad move!

[Isabella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very well-written book about going to college and its highs and lows. College is a time of personal growth and I think this book captures this perfectly.

[Debbie Armbruster · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oddly enough, I enjoyed this!

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the hundred-plus years straddling when the events of this novel take place and the present day, I found the general thesis of the novel to be interestingly accurate. The relationship one has with his college experience, the nostalgia sure to follow, and the trials therein and after are all well-recorded here.

Problems include rampant misogyny, BS piety (sex and booze so morally wrong I hate myself...), and over-simplified reactions from spoiled rich kids. Though I don't think these things are far off from the 1920s, when colleges were less inclusive and Marks wrote this.

Like many books of this genre at this time, the novel closes with a soliloquy-esque philosophical wondering from a professor about the value of education, which I think makes the book. Still, it truly only represents the experience of a fortunate few.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the 1925 film w/ Clara Bow (the original It Girl) so I decided to check out the book. It is OK. A beach ready from the 1920's. College life hasn't changed much I suppose - drinking, fraternities, sexual frustration (and pleasure). As a historical narrative of college life in the roaring 20's it is mostly recommended. One of the occasions where I can say "the movie is better".

[L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of a young college student trying to stay on the straight and narrow path and keep his purity. Yep, that's right, he's saving himself for marriage.

[Katharine Holden · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting, but rather silly and heavy-handed. An obvious message book that lays it on with a trowel. I read an early printing, with a still from the film from Preferred Pictures.