The Rampant Age

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.. Very Good. 1928. Unstated edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [good sound copy, spine cloth a little darkened, light vertical stain near right edge of front cover; "Ex Libris" bookplate of MGM writer/producer Carey Wilson on front pastedown, vintage bookseller's label (Unity Pegues, Hollywood, Calif.) on rear pastedown]. Novel about Jazz Age high-schoolers, positing (in the words of one contemporary reviewer) that "drinking, petting and even more flagrant violations of social conventions originate in high school, and not in college." (The same reviewer noted that "the atmosphere for this story, it was said, was absorbed at East H.S. in Columbus, Ohio." The setting in the book itself is described only as "the little corn-belt town of Westfield.") The book was adapted for a low-budget 1930 film of the same name, starring James Murray and Merna Kennedy -- both of whom had been riding high just two years earlier, Murray as the star of King Vidor's late-silent classic THE CROWD, Kennedy as the female lead in Charlie Chaplin's THE CIRCUS, but with careers already on the downturn by 1930. (Especially Murray, who was done in by alcohol in 1936 at the age of 35.) The author was only eighteen years old when this book was published, but had already been publishing short fiction as early as 1925; ten of his stories appeared in the pulp Weird Tales between 1925 and 1928, which no doubt accounts for the fact that this novel is dedicated to that publication's editor, Farnsworth Wright. .