The Plastic Age

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) chroniclesthe 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."