Splendor in the Grass

In 1928 Kansas, Wilma Dean "Deanie" Loomis is a teenage girl who follows her mother's advice to resist her desire for sex with her boyfriend Bud Stamper, the son of one of the town's more prosperous families due to oil drilling. In turn, Bud reluctantly follows the advice of his father Ace to wait to marry Deanie until after college and to find another kind of girl with whom to satisfy his desires.

Bud's parents are ashamed of his older sister Ginny, a flapper and promiscuous party girl who smokes, drinks, and has recently been brought back from Chicago, where her parents had a marriage annulled to someone who married her solely for her money; the rumor around town is that she actually had an abortion. Disappointed in their daughter, Bud's parents pin all their hopes on him and pressure him to attend Yale University. The emotional pressure is too much for Bud, who suffers a physical breakdown and nearly dies of pneumonia.

At a New Year's Eve party, Ginny becomes drunk, to the humiliation and disappointment of her parents. Bud attempts to take her home, but she refuses. Instead, she looks for someone to dance with her, asserting that men "only want to talk to her in the dark." She leaves the party with a man, and Bud finds her outside in a car being raped by the man, a crowd of men surrounding them. He starts a fight with the man, but loses when the crowd joins in. Bud takes Deanie home after the party. Disturbed by what he's seen happen to his sister, he tells Deanie that they have to stop kissing and fooling around and breaks up with her.

Aware that his classmate Juanita is willing to become sexually involved with him, Bud has a liaison with her. Shortly afterward, depressed that Bud ended their relationship, Deanie attends a party with classmate Toots Tuttle; trying out Ginny Stamper's behavior, she goes outside with Bud and comes on to him. When he rebuffs her, shocked because he always thought of her as a "nice" girl, she returns to Toots, who drives her to a private spot by a pond that streams into a waterfall. While there, Deanie realizes that she can't go through with sex, at which point she is almost raped. Escaping from Toots and driven close to madness, she attempts to commit suicide by jumping in the pond, but is rescued just before reaching the falls. Her parents sell their oil stock to pay for her institutionalization, which actually turns out to be a blessing in disguise, because they make a profit prior to the Crash of 1929 that leads to the Great Depression.

While Deanie is in the institution, she meets another patient, Johnny Masterson, who has anger issues targeted at his parents, who want him to be a surgeon. The two patients form a bond. Meanwhile, Bud is sent to Yale, where he fails practically all his courses but meets Angelina, the daughter of Italian immigrants who run a local restaurant in New Haven. In October 1929, Bud's father travels to New Haven in an attempt to persuade the dean not to expel Bud from school; Bud tells the dean he only aspires to own a ranch. The stock market crashes while Ace is in New Haven and he loses everything. He takes Bud to New York for a weekend, including to a cabaret nightclub, then commits suicide by jumping from a building – something he had been joking about just a short time earlier – and Bud must identify the body.

Deanie returns home from the asylum after two years and six months, "almost to the day." Ace's widow has gone to live with relatives, and Bud's sister has died in a car crash. Deanie's mother wants to shield her from any potential anguish from meeting Bud, so she pretends to not know where he is. When Deanie's friends from high school come over, her mother gets them to agree to feign ignorance on Bud's whereabouts. However, Deanie's father refuses to coddle his daughter and tells her that Bud has taken up ranching and lives on the old family farm. Her friends drive Deanie to meet Bud, at an old farmhouse. He is now dressed in plain clothes and married to Angelina; they have an infant son named Bud Jr. and another child on the way. Deanie lets Bud know that she is going to marry John (who is now a doctor in Cincinnati). During their brief reunion, Deanie and Bud realize that both must accept what life has thrown at them. Bud says, "What's the point? You gotta take what comes." They each relate that they "don't think about happiness very much anymore."

As Deanie leaves with her friends, Bud only seems partially satisfied by the direction his life has taken. After the others are gone, he reassures Angelina, who has realized that Deanie was once the love of his life. Driving away, Deanie's friends ask her if she is still in love with Bud. She does not answer them, but her voice is heard reciting four lines from Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality":

"Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower
We will grieve not; rather find
Strength in what remains behind."