The Plastic Age

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' no...