Modernism in Fiction: The Lost Generation
Definition and Common Features:
 The generation-making factor: WW I.  Activity: between the two wars;
 1st group of writers that makes American literature a model
 Expatriotism
Basic Experience I.: America
Era of great changes:
 Turn of century: changes in society. After a visible disintegration of the tradition that
kept together 19th century literature, modernism aims at recreating the values that
define art → experimenting nature of art, including literature
 America: the intellectual and business spheres are separate. Authors: inner exile or
emigration; understanding what America is like—from a distance:
Expatriotism
 "The sharpening of the senses" (def. by Dos Passos) in Europe; geographical and
psychical travelling: WW→ America (provincial, feeling in exile) → Paris (voluntary
exile; discovering America)
 Task: to write about "the complex fate of being an American" (H. James):
documentative, using up autobiographical experiences; writing method capable of
depicting complexity;
 Aim: easthatic (experience) and pragmatic (achievement) maximum
Important literary trend: Naturalism
 scientific approach, analysing gloomy reality, pessimistic as to characters; social and
biological determinism: Herbert Spencer's social darwinism. (man = pawn on the
chessboard, his fate is controlled by unknown powers)
Basic Experience II.: War
The collapse of values caused by the war coincides with their rebelling against America
Adventure, connecting closeness to death with the process of growing up; absurdity
Volunteers: desire of love (Alan Seeger's poetry: Death  Lover in "I Have a Rendezvous with
Representatives of the Lost Generation
Gertrude Stein (1874-1948):
 Announcing the beginning of the 20th century; radically experimental writing; residing
and working in Paris: meeting place for various artists, including American writers (27
rue de Fleurus: The Stein salon)
 “That's what you are. That's what you all are…All of you young people who served in
the war. You are a lost generation”. (to Hemingway); meaning rootlessness
 “A rose is a rose is a rose”
 Works: The Making of Americans;The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Sherwood Anderson
 Greatest Discovery of American Naturalists: Country Town
 depedestrialisation of the American local unit, losing the Jeffersonian nostalgy
 Winesburg, Ohio (1919) – “Adventure”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
 1st writer of the new America  the America of money (WW I → huge industrial
progress, wealth + progressive puritanism (alcohol ban) → hedonism)
 his own romance of / and money: exceptional attitude to money: the means to rise into
position; writes for magazines for money  not experimental in structure, originality
lies in atmosphere & topic
 Writer of the “American Dream” (concept: James Truslow Adams)
 The Great Gatsby (1925); (Gatsby pursuing the Dream embodied by Daisy; West Egg
vs; East Egg society; the self-made man as success story but the failure of the Dream,
for the Dream is beyond the money that is necessary to accomplish it;)
 "Winter Dreams", "Babylon Revisited" (of the '30s);
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Background:
 expatriate in the 1920s living mainly in France, Spain, returning to US occasionally;
mostly avoiding typical topics of America and of the era; exhausting his
autobiographical experiences
 unique (self-)education: many sports (eg. boxing) as training to become the ideal man
 journalist experience: dense cable language
 iceberg principle (1/8 visible, 7/8 supportive)
War in Literature:
 short story cycle: In Our Time, 1925
◦ vignettes + stories make a unity of novel; (cf. Winesburg, Ohio)
◦ vignette: snapshots, stating facts with total intensity, presenting a state of mind;
 novels: A Farewell to Arms (1929); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940);
 drama: The Fifth Column, 1937
Expatriotic experience:
Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises) (1926);
Important short stories:
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (death experience to become a man), “The
Snows of Kilimanjaro” (money as corruptive force; investigating the relation between good
life vs good art; experience and art), “The Killers”, “Indian Camp”, “Hills like White
Elephants”;
The Hemingway Code Hero:
 Man needs test
 Grace under pressure: when confronting death, man needs to behave in an acceptable
way
 Only by confronting death man can discover his own sense of being, his own
potentiality
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Nobel Prize, 1954