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

The "Lost Generation"

Ernest and Hadley Hemingway at a cafe with Lady Duff Twysden and others, Pamplona, Spain, 1925. The Lost Generation is a term used to refer to the generation of writers active immediately after World War I, especially expatriate writers whose work is characterized by a mood of futility and despair.

Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

The coining of the phrase is sometimes attributed to Gertrude Stein* and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast. In the latter, he explained, "I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes." (A few lines after, recalling the risks and losses of the war, he adds, "I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation?")

It also refers to the time period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. More generally, the term is used for the generation of young people coming of age in the United States during and shortly after World War I. For this reason, the generation is sometimes known as the World War I Generation. In Europe, they are most often known as the Generation of 1914, for the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they are sometimes called the Génération du Feu, the Generation of Fire. Broadly, the term is often used to refer to the younger literary modernists.

In Britain the term "Lost generation" was originally used for those who died in combat in World War I, and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite. Many felt "that 'the flower of youth' and the 'best of the nation' had been destroyed", for example such notable casualties as the poets Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, or physicist Henry Moseley.

Figures identified with the American "Lost Generation" include authors and poets Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, and John Dos Passos.

* As described by Hemingway in the chapter "Une Generation Perdue," of A Moveable Feast, the term was coined by the owner of the Paris garage where Gertrude Stein took her Model T Ford, and was picked up and translated by her.
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Like many other cities in Europe, Paris was devastated by the Great War. As has been widely acknowledged, the war was one of the world’s first highly mechanised conflicts. After decades of excitement and futurist dreams on both sides of the Atlantic—typified by the Great Exhibitions in London, Paris, and Chicago from 1851—the War reflected the dark, disturbing underside of technological invention. Some of the artists and authors who remained in Paris after the cessation of hostilities had served in this unprecedented clash of civilisations; others had reported on the events and the terrible political and humanitarian upheavals afterwards.

If the War highlighted alarming aspects of twentieth-century innovation, Paris also somehow clung to its reputation as the capital of bohemian culture. The city had long been famous for its philosophical intrigues and artistic inspiration, its avant-garde tastes and flamboyant personalities. The inter-war period saw the rise of Montparnasse as the hub of the city’s artistic community, its bars and cafés resounding to the pulse of “hot” jazz music and intellectual debate.

All this colour and creativity was so different from the austere materialism of American cities (mainly New York and Chicago), as depicted by “Naturalist” writers like Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair (all of whom would make their way to Europe in due course). As the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses suggested in 1922, the Parisian cultural scene was more permissive of literature which confronted established mores and codes of behaviour. Culturally as well as morally, Paris in the 1920s remained one of the most exciting, sophisticated cities in the world. Capital of the avant-garde in all its forms, the city played host to any number of intersecting artistic cliques including Modernists and Cubists, Dadaists and Futurists, Expressionists and Surrealists. These were the years of Picasso and Modigliani, Braque and Duchamp, Stravinski and Satie, Diaghilev and Cocteau. Radical developments in the visual and performing arts were mirrored in the Continental literature of the time, from the surrealist shock tactics of André Bréton and Guillaume Apollinaire, to the textual experimentation of Joyce and Beckett. It was into this vibrant, inspiring foment of idea and innovation that the self-imposed exiles of America’s “Lost Generation” flung themselves. Young radicals like Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound, and, a little later on, Henry Miller and Anais Nin, published some of their most powerful and controversial works in the city.

On the face of it the sobriquet of “Lost Generation” seems an odd collective description for a group of writers and artists who were among the brightest flowering of American literary talent yet to emerge on the international stage. In fact, it was Gertrude Stein—the scene’s abiding spirit and prominent literary hostess—who coined the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway (“you are all a lost generation”). However, it was undoubtedly the latter’s use of the phrase as the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner’s, 1926; 12711.c.22), his epochal novel of wild years spent in Paris and Spain, that popularised the expression and made clear its apocalyptic overtones. The phrase—and Hemingway’s book—depicted this generation as characterised by doomed youth, hedonism, uncompromising creativity, and wounded—both literally and metaphorically—by the experience of war. To varying degrees, these virtues and vices were to be found in the life-story of nearly every member of the Lost Generation. Aside from their wild lifestyles, though, what is most striking is the astonishing range, depth, and influence of work produced by this community of American expatriates in Paris.

This outburst of creativity was supported by an explosion of small-scale entrepreneurialism in the creative arts. Much of the literature produced by the American Modernists was published by small presses also run by expatriates, including Shakespeare & Company, Contact Editions, Black Sun Press, Three Mountains Press, Plain Editions, and Obelisk Press. A list of the canonical works of inter-war American literature produced in Paris, following the landmark publication of Joyce’s Ulysses by Shakespeare & Co. (owned by Princeton expatriate Sylvia Beach 1 ) in 1922, provides a key to the literary future of the United States:

• H.D (Hilda Doolittle), Palimpsest (Paris: Contact Editions, 1922; 12651.i.54)
• William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1923; Cup.510.fac.4)
• Ezra Pound, Indiscretions (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1923; Cup.510.fac.1 [mislaid])
• Ernest Hemingway, in our time (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924; Cup.510.fac.6)
• Robert McAlmon, Village: as it happened through a fifteen year period (Paris: Contact Editions, 1924; Cup.410.f.1246)
• Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanac (Paris: Contact Editions, 1926; X.519/20735)
• Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (Paris: Contact Press, 1925; X.520/32188)
• Hart Crane, The Bridge, A Poem (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930; Cup.510.fa.15)
• Archibald MacLeish, New Found Land, Fourteen Poems (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930; Cup.400.c.22)
• Ezra Pound, Imaginary Letters (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930; Cup.510.fa.16)
• ________. A Draft of XXX Cantos (Paris: Hours Press, 1930; Cup.510.fac.14)
• Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Basso Snell (Paris: Contact Editions, 1931; Cup.410g.725)
• William Faulkner, Sanctuary (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932)
• Ernest Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932)
• Dorothy Parker, Laments for the Living (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932)
  Katherine Anne Porter, Hacienda (Harrison of Paris, 1934)
• Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1935; Cup.804.bb.5)
• Henry Miller, Black Spring (Paris: Obelisk, 1936; Cup.804.p.6; Durrell 124)
• Anais Nin, House of Incest (Paris: Obelisk, 1936; 12623.k.28)
• Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (Paris: Obelisk, 1939; Cup.804.bb.8)
• Anais Nin, Winter of Artifice (Paris: Obelisk, 1939; 12631.r.6)

Notes

1. James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare & Company, 1922; C.116.g.17). Supporting the manuscript holdings of the many authors who surrounded her, the British Library also holds a substantial collection of correspondence and other manuscript material related to Sylvia Beach and her proprietorship of the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris. According to André Chamson, Beach’s library and bookstore did “more to link England, the United States, Ireland, and France than four great ambassadors combined”; Chamson, quoted in Hugh Ford, Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-1939 (1975; X.981/10131).

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Life with Zelda

While at Camp Sheridan, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre (1900-1948), the "top girl," in Fitzgerald's words, of Montgomery, Alabama, youth society. The two were engaged in 1919 and Fitzgerald moved into an apartment at 200 Claremont Avenue in New York City to try to lay a foundation for his life with Zelda. Working at an advertising firm and writing short stories, Fitzgerald was unable to convince Zelda that he would be able to support her. She broke off the engagement and Fitzgerald returned to his parents' house in St. Paul to revise The Romantic Egotist. Recast as This Side of Paradise, it was accepted by Scribner's in the fall of 1919, and Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement. It was published on March 26, 1920, and became one of the most popular books of the year, defining the flapper generation. The next week, Scott and Zelda were married in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. Their daughter and only child, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921.

Although Fitzgerald's passion lay in writing novels, they never sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and Zelda adopted as New York celebrities. To support this lifestyle, he turned to writing short stories for such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Magazine, and Esquire magazine, and sold movie rights of his stories and novels to Hollywood studios. He was constantly in financial trouble and often required loans from his literary agent, Harold Ober, and his editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins.

The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, published in 1922, represents an impressive development over the comparatively immature This Side of Paradise. The Great Gatsby, which many consider his masterpiece, was published in 1925. Fitzgerald made several famous excursions to Europe, notably Paris and the French Riviera during the 20s, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway.

Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and the schizophrenia that struck Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her life. In 1932, she was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland, and Scott rented the "La Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson to work on his book, which had become the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients. It was published in 1934 as Tender Is the Night. Critics regard it as one of Fitzgerald's finest works.

Knowledgerush

The great Gatsby

Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer of 1922 to learn about the bond business. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, a group who have made their fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who are prone to garish displays of wealth. Nick's next-door neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night.

Nick is unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he was educated at Yale and has social connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper class. Nick drives out to East Egg one evening for dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, an erstwhile classmate of Nick's at Yale. Daisy and Tom introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful, cynical young woman with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship. Nick also learns a bit about Daisy and Tom's marriage: Jordan tells him that Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the valley of ashes, a gray industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom and Myrtle. At a vulgar, gaudy party in the apartment that Tom keeps for the affair, Myrtle begins to taunt Tom about Daisy, and Tom responds by breaking her nose.

As the summer progresses, Nick eventually garners an invitation to one of Gatsby's legendary parties. He encounters Jordan Baker at the party, and they meet Gatsby himself, a surprisingly young man who affects an English accent, has a remarkable smile, and calls everyone “old sport.” Gatsby asks to speak to Jordan alone, and, through Jordan, Nick later learns more about his mysterious neighbor. Gatsby tells Jordan that he knew Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and is deeply in love with her. He spends many nights staring at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion. Gatsby's extravagant lifestyle and wild parties are simply an attempt to impress Daisy. Gatsby now wants Nick to arrange a reunion between himself and Daisy, but he is afraid that Daisy will refuse to see him if she knows that he still loves her. Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house, without telling her that Gatsby will also be there. After an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby and Daisy reestablish their connection. Their love rekindled, they begin an affair.

After a short time, Tom grows increasingly suspicious of his wife's relationship with Gatsby. At a luncheon at the Buchanans' house, Gatsby stares at Daisy with such undisguised passion that Tom realizes Gatsby is in love with her. Though Tom is himself involved in an extramarital affair, he is deeply outraged by the thought that his wife could be unfaithful to him. He forces the group to drive into New York City, where he confronts Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Tom asserts that he and Daisy have a history that Gatsby could never understand, and he announces to his wife that Gatsby is a criminal—his fortune comes from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities. Daisy realizes that her allegiance is to Tom, and Tom contemptuously sends her back to East Egg with Gatsby, attempting to prove that Gatsby cannot hurt him.

When Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive through the valley of ashes, however, they discover that Gatsby's car has struck and killed Myrtle, Tom's lover. They rush back to Long Island, where Nick learns from Gatsby that Daisy was driving the car when it struck Myrtle, but that Gatsby intends to take the blame. The next day, Tom tells Myrtle's husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver of the car. George, who has leapt to the conclusion that the driver of the car that killed Myrtle must have been her lover, finds Gatsby in the pool at his mansion and shoots him dead. He then fatally shoots himself.

Nick stages a small funeral for Gatsby, ends his relationship with Jordan, and moves back to the Midwest to escape the disgust he feels for the people surrounding Gatsby's life and for the emptiness and moral decay of life among the wealthy on the East Coast. Nick reflects that just as Gatsby's dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and individualism has disintegrated into the mere pursuit of wealth. Though Gatsby's power to transform his dreams into reality is what makes him “great,” Nick reflects that the era of dreaming—both Gatsby's dream and the American dream—is over.

Tales of the Jazz Age

Centre Section of the triptych Grosstadt, 1927-8, by Otto Dix (1891-1969). It is an evocation of the Gershwin (1898-1937) period - the Jazz Age. This age and the kind of music (Jazz) were condemned by the Nazis as decadent and racially degenerate.

The curious case of Benjamin Button

"This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler's "Note-books.


The story was published in "Collier's" last summer and provoked this startling letter from an anonymous admirer in Cincinnati:

"Sir--

I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices of cheese in my life but of all the peices of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest peice. I hate to waste a peice of stationary on you but I will."

Source: The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tales of the Jazz Age