GOLDEN YEARS: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, by James Chappel

“You see these gray hairs?” Dorothy Parker asked in The New Yorker in 1928. “Well, making whoopee with the intelligentsia was the way I earned them.”

Parker was 35 when she wrote that. Old age seemed to come on earlier back in the day. I’m thinking especially of poor Edward Casaubon, the scholarly suitor in “Middlemarch.” Edward is perceived to be “dry” and “no better than a mummy” at 45.

I turn 60 this week. How old that seems will depend on how old you are. Unlike Aerosmith, I’m not ready for my “Peace Out” tour. Nor am I yet studying the merits of competing brands of compression socks. I do plan, eventually, to use an ear trumpet rather than hearing inserts, to better scare off children.

I was born in 1965, narrowly missing the baby boom. I’m an elder of the Generation X tribe, two-thirds or so of the way around life’s track. To get a better handle on where I, and we, are heading, I picked up James Chappel’s new book, “Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age.”

This is sober history, in the sense that it is no fun at all to read. “Golden Years” is related in baked-potato, hold-the-butter-and-salt prose. While reading it I felt my life slipping away more rapidly than usual. But Chappel, an associate professor of history at Duke and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center, knows this material front to back and he gets some important things said.

His book is a tour of America’s 20th century, in succeeding waves of oldies. He lingers especially on the passage of the Social Security Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935. He rightly considers it to be “one of the great wonders of the American state,” as well as “our greatest poverty-reduction program.” He credits Social Security with helping invent the very notion of old age as a coherent stage of life.