num_pages: 352
description: 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 risqu and sensational book that tarnished Browns 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.
language: English
title: The Plastic Age
publisher: Southern Illinois University Press