The+Lost+Generation

The Lost Generation Lost Generation writers had many defining characteristics, but they may have been most famous for their dismal perceptions of the world, their lives in Paris, and their literature. They believed the world was fraught with failure and hypocrisy, and they saw themselves united “in rebellion against the stuffy people who were misruling the world” (Leland 12 and Cowley 8). Additionally, Lost Generation writers expatriated themselves to Paris after World War I because they saw America as “inhospitable” to art (Monk 28). Following the 1920 crackdown on American radicals under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the Lost Generation did not feel free to publish in America (Leland 71). Paris, by contrast, offered the freedom to publish, as well as the opportunity for an exciting night life which the Lost Generation would not ignore. In fact, the members of the Lost Generation were dedicated participants in Paris’ night life who were frequently spotted at parties. But whatever else life in Paris may have included for the members of the Lost Generation, they always circled back to writing (Aldridge 3). Part of their writing activities involved starting new literary magazines, including //Broom//, //transition//, and //This Quarter// (Aldridge 13). Although for the most part, the Lost Generation rejected the guidance of previous generations, they tended to listen more to their innovative literary predecessors (Cowley 9). Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce were particularly influential on Lost Generation writers (Bradbury 14).

Over the years, many critics and writers have attempted to interpret why the Lost Generation was “lost.” Most explanations have read World War I as a catalyst for the Lost Generation’s disillusionment. One common explanation is that the war took away all absolute principles (Aldridge 13 and Cowley 9). Ernest Hemingway codifies the idea that the war took away abstract value systems in //A Farewell to Arms//: “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates” (Hemingway, //Sun Also Rises// 185). Furthermore, Gertrude Stein writes that René Crevel, was left to define his own principles, “the war having destroyed for his generation” the traditional value systems (Stein 226). Similarly, in //Exile’s Return//, Malcolm Cowley relates the loss of the pre-war world with the Lost Generation’s alcohol-drenched and party-centered lifestyles. He hypothesizes that the war had destroyed the world in which the Lost Generation was prepared to live and had equipped them instead for a life of travel and excitement. The life of excitement, therefore, was the only way they knew to live (Cowley 9).

The war experience also affected the Lost Generation’s relationship with other generations. Because they had the unique experience of World War I, they felt irreparably disconnected from previous generations, which allowed them to criticize the world from outsiders’ perspectives. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Scandal Detectives,” “the gulf is infinite and unbridgeable” (qtd. in Cowley 7). But at the same time that feelings of separation alienated them from the rest of the world, it tightened their connections with each other, resulting in their proclamations of “kinship with one another” and “separation from older writers” (Cowley 6).

Despite the Lost Generation’s perceived separation from the world, or perhaps because of it, Lost Generation writers found similarities with the writers of the World War II generation. World War II writers “felt an immediate kinship with the Lost Generation, and their work attempted to build upon “the stream of protest” the Lost Generation writers began (Aldridge viii). Ultimately, Lost Generation writers contributed some of the most innovative literary works of the twentieth century to the Modernist canon and strongly influenced the war writers who came after them.

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