The Plastic Age

Hugh Carver enters Sanford College as an eager, sheltered freshman and emerges four years later remade by everything the 1920s campus throws at him. Percy Marks charts the drinking, hazing, petting parties, and sudden freedoms of Jazz Age student life, along with the disillusion that follows when idealism meets reality. The frank treatment of sex and liquor made the novel a bestseller and got it banned in Boston, and it cost Marks his teaching post at Brown. Published in 1924, the book reads now as a sharp snapshot of a generation testing every boundary its parents had drawn. Marks wrote from the inside, a young instructor who knew exactly what his students got up to after dark. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.