The Lost Generation
The Great War, Paris and the Birth of Modern American Literature
Ernest Hemingway recalled in his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) a conversation he had with his onetime mentor Gertrude Stein who said to Hemingway about the excessive bohemian lifestyle of expatriate Americans in 1920s Paris “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation …”[1] Though the moniker initially represented Americans brought to Europe by The Great War, it grew to refer to the writers and artists who lived in Paris during the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s.
Stein’s commentary was about the destructive nature of World War I that left a generation of young men without role models and mentors, which forced the young writers and artists who participated or witnessed the war to contemplate the carnage and the overwhelming loss of life witnessed in person or from afar.
The myth of this generation of mischief and debauchery was being formulated in real time as minor literary footnotes such as Harold Stearns, a social critic, promoted Paris as an alternative to the Puritanical lifestyle and prohibition of the United States. The publication of Hemingway’s semi-autobiographical novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) chronicling the expatriate lifestyle and its morale corruption only helped further establish the narrative of The Lost Generation as a generation without a moral compass.
However, as this young cohort of writers began returning home to the United States or were forced elsewhere abroad as the drum beats of another war grew louder, they began to contemplate their time in the Parisian artistic scene and to raise questions about their experience as part of The Lost Generation.
Hemingway for example grew to loathe Stein’s assertion that he and his contemporaries were without focus, insisting through his memoir that Stein and the old guard didn’t understand what it meant to produce truth in writing. Whereas Hemingway initially bought into the notion of his generation of expatriates as being aimless and morally corrupt, he later began to “construe loss as a thing possessing intrinsic value.”[2] “Hemingway shows that it is the absent or lost ‘thing’ that matters, maintains the greatest value, and defines rather than undermines every generation.”[3]
English professor Craig Monk writes of Hemingway’s “those Americans who had returned home began to provide serious analysis of a decade spent abroad, most commonly defending their cohort or disavowing, outright, a Lost Generation.”[4] Writers who flocked to Paris following The Second World War’s conclusion continued to use The Lost Generation in their writing but to disassociate themselves from their predecessors.[5]
So, then what exactly is The Lost Generation, loosely defined by most historians as a collection of artists and writers in the two decades between the Great Wars? Did it exist? Why did it exist? J. Gerald Kennedy explains in his history Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (1993) that American expatriatism is as old as the United States itself.[6] Which raises another question, why is this generation of American expatriates still so widely held in our popular imagination?
The easy explanation is that the generation is nicely chronologically defined situated between the two biggest wastes of human life in history. But the true historical difference is that this generation of American writers defined modern American literature. The previous and current histories of The Lost Generation are primarily intellectual exercises mostly pursued by the writers themselves through their memoirs and letters seeking to understand a decade of metamorphoses for those involved. Later, historians and English majors explored the history of The Lot Generation narrowing the focus on set and setting, the creation of autobiography as viable and commercially successful literature, and the generation’s placement in the Modernism movement.
However, apart from Arlen Hansen’s Gentlemen Volunteers: The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in the Great War, August 1914-September 1918, there has been little scholarship on the direct influence on the Great War on the writing of the young authors. Though the war presents an ever-present backdrop, its influence on the intellectual and emotional development of Hemingway and company has been mostly an assumed acknowledgement, but rarely the focus.
The question, broad in scope but refined as the dissertation and research process unfold, are simplistic yet unanswered: What about Paris and The Great War made possible the intellectual environment conducive to creating the greatest works of American literature? More broadly still, are there lessons to be learned that can replicate this decade of literary success?
The primary and secondary source material used in this research is not likely to yield never seen revelatory texts that redefine our knowledge of this brief historical era, but source material viewed and interpreted through a different perspective will yield a unique interpretation. Further, the sources used for this historical endeavor will rely on primarily the English language texts available because most of the writers of interest never learned more than a conversational knowledge of their foreign hosts’ native tongue.
War has always impacted the intellectual and emotional lives of those involved, but The Lost Generation defined American literature. The Civil War didn’t, nor the Revolution. What is the missing variable for the historical shift in American literature? Was it just Paris?
[1] Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964).
[2] Tomkins, David. "The "Lost Generation" And The Generation of Loss: Ernest Hemingway's Materiality of Absence and The Sun Also Rises." Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 4 (Winter, 2008)
[3] Ibid
[4] Monk, Craig. Writing the Lost Generation: Expatriate Autobiography and American Modernism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008.
[5] Ibid
[6] Kennedy, J. Gerald. Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.