The Lost Generation

Disillusionment!

Members of the Lost Generation were often disillusioned and tried desperately to live normal lives regardless of the tragic effects of the Great World War. Many wives were left without husbands, children without fathers, and mothers without sons. However, they were forced to continue living as normal through the 1920's.

Lost Generation

--Coined by Gertrude Stein, who said, "You are all a Lost Generation."

The "Lost Generation" was lost in that the values that its members were being taught didn't fit the reality of life after the brutal and horrifying World War I. The group of writers who moved to Paris believed that America was intolerant, materialistic, and unspiritual. They helped to establish many of the styles and themes that are still used in literature today.

The "Lost Generation"-

1) Group of disillusioned American authors who lived in Paris in the 1920's and 1930's (younger literary modernists)

2) Generation of young people in the United States shortly after World War I

3) Two "Lost Generation" presidents were Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower


Characteristics of "Lost Generation" Authors

~youthful idealism

~sought the meaning of life

~drank a lot

~often love affairs

~many of the finest literary masterpieces were written during this period

~rejected modern American materialism

~lived in Paris

~gained prominence in twentieth century literature and created a mold for many future writers

Examples of Prominent Authors

Ernest Hemingway- led in the adaptation of the technique of naturalism in literature; wrote The Sun Also Rises, a naturalistic novel that included post-war disillusionment

F. Scott Fitzgerald- portrayed the spirit of the "Jazz Age"; wrote The Great Gatsby, which also was an expression of disillusionment

John Dos Passos- questioned the meaning of modern life; his novel Manhattan Transfer portrays the hopelessness of live in American cities

Common "Lost Generation" Members

The common people of the "Lost Generation" (born from 1883 to 1900)grew up in a time when mass immigration was occuring and America was changing drastically. Upon the return of the soldiers from WWI, the American lifestyle was altered. Many became disillusioned and they became known as the "bad kids" and "flaming youth." Doughboys, flappers, gangsters, and stars were all common during the "Roaring Twenties." However, the twenties came to a close with a bang when the Stock Market crashed, ending the spirit of the 1920's.

Source: The Lost Generation and 1920s Pop Culture

Ernest Hemingway The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures.

Nobelprize.org