First-Class Times: Writing about New College's Charter Classes

“The best education,” the New College admissions brochure declared, “is the active confrontation of two first-class minds.” Attracted by that vision—and the prospect of a college education in the Florida sun with no grades or required classes—dozens of carefully selected high school seniors turned down more conventional schools and headed for an untested educational experiment on the shores of Sarasota Bay.

The contributors to this book, which covers—with a few exceptions—New College’s charter class years of 1964–1970, have used memoir, fiction, and poetry to paint a vivid picture of the craziness, the anguish, the anxiety, and the euphoria of those prelapsarian times.

Besides the contributions by alumni/ae and faculty members, the book includes the republication of “The Death of Edge,” a revealing account by novelist Mack Thomas of his brief tenure as the college’s first writer-in-residence in 1966.