The Lost Generation

The Lost American Dream: Part 2 The Lost Generation

That is what you are. That's what you all are... All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation. Gertrude SteinIn A Moveable Feast, which was published after Hemingway and Stein were both dead and after a literary feud that lasted much of their life, Hemingway reveals that the phrase was actually originated by the garage owner who serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car in a way satisfactory to Stein, the owner shouted at her, "You are all a generation perdu."[1] Stein, in telling Hemingway the story, added, "That is what you are. That's what you all are... All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."[2] This generation included distinguished artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Waldo Peirce, Alan Seeger, and Erich Maria Remarque.2The Lost GenerationNearly 10 million soldiers died and about 21 million were wounded. U.S. deaths totaled 116,516 in WWI

Thegenerationof young people who came of age during and shortly after World War I is known as the WWI generation or the Lost Generation.

Characterized by a feeling of disillusionment, many American Writers migrated to Europe (especially Paris) during WWI to WWIIAvant-GardeFrench translation: Advance guard

Pushes boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or status quo

Experimental and innovative

Promotes radical social reforms

IMPACTAmerica's awareness of its lack of cosmopolitanism helped establish Americas culture as it is today.

As American customs became more defined, European and other countries recognized America as a distinctive culture and nation.

Beyond this, the novels of the Lost Generation give insight into the American life during the 1920s

Some Key Writers of the Lost Generation Ernest Hemingway*F. Scott Fitzgerald*John Dos Passos* E.E. Cummings*Gertrude Stein*Ford Maddox FordSylvia BeachArchibald MacLeishEzra Pound*Sherwood AndersonJohn SteinbackJames Joyce*Zelda Fitzgerald*John Steinbeck Existentialism and the Lost GenerationMuch of modern literature, philosophy, and art portrays the world as lonely or meaningless.

Existential protagonists are often lonely, anxiety ridden characters who are trying to make sense of their lives, or who are trying to retain their courage in spite of the fact that the universe cares nothing for those things we call beautiful or good.

Modernist Writers and Inagist Poetry: lyrical expressionMoved away from poetry inspired by personal imagination, culture, emotions and memories of the poet Believed poetry should make an intellectual statement about the world. Favored precise detailed imagery and clear simplistic languageExperimented with syntax and structure

E.E.Cummings

Manipulates syntax and punctuation for stylistic purposes*

poetry often deals with themes ofloveand nature, as well as the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world.*

I carry your heart with me(I carry it in my heart)I am never without it(Anywhere I go you go, my dear; And whatever is done by only me is your doing,My darling)I fear no fate(For you are my fate, my sweet)I want no world(For beautiful you are my world, my true)And it's you are whatever a moon has always meantAnd whatever a sun will always sing is youHere is the deepest secret nobody knows(Here is the root of the root and the bud of the budAnd the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which growsHigher than soul can hope or mind can hide)And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apartI carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)--by E.E. Cummings

T.S. EliotThe Wasteland Parallels Valley of Ashes in Gatsby

A poet must take as his material his own language as it is actually spoken around himHis direct duty is to his language

Exerpt from The WastelandThe Waste LandBYT. S. ELIOT FOR EZRA POUND IL MIGLIOR FABBROI. The Burial of the Dead April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt deutsch.And when we were children, staying at the arch-dukes,My cousins, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie,Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.In the mountains, there you feel free.I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

Ezra Pound

Considered by many to be the poet responsible for defining a modernist visual in poetry. *

n their manifesto the Imagists promised:Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subject or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

During World War IIPound made in Rome a series of hysterical and bitter radio broadcasts, that were openly fascist. In one of his radio talks he suggested that "if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom against Jews... there might de something to say for it." In 1945 he was arrested by the U.S. forces and put in a six foot by six foot "gorilla cage" - he was still an American citizen. Labelled as paranoid by the examining psychiatrists in a trial, Pound spent 12 years in Washington, D.C., in a hospital for the criminally insane. It has been suggested that Pound was feigning insanity to escape the death penalty, but the treason indictment did not drastically affect his ability to write and translate poetry. During this period he received the 1949 Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos, which concerned his imprisonment at the camp near Pisa. After Pound was released from St. Elizabeth's hospital due to the actions and efforts of his last living protg, Eustace Mullins, he returned to Italy, where he spent his remaining years. Pound died on November 1, 1972, in Venice. According to Katherine Anne Porter, "Pound was one of the most opinionated and unselfish men who ever lived, and he made friends and enemies everywhere by the simple exercise of the classic American constitutional right of free speech." (The Letters of E.P., 1907-1941, review in New York Times Book Review, 29 Oct. 1950)

13THE GARDENBy Ezra PoundEn robe de parade.SamainLike a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anemia. And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretionF. Scott FitzgeraldIt was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,

Literary opinion makers were reluctant to accord Fitzgerald full marks as a serious craftsman. His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible writer; yet he was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts. Fitzgeralds clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style evoked the emotions associated with time and place. When critics objected to Fitzgeralds concern with love and success, his response was: But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with. The chief theme of Fitzgeralds work is aspirationthe idealism he regarded as defining American character. Another major theme was mutability or loss. As a social historian Fitzgerald became identified with the Jazz Age he wrote in Echoes of the Jazz Age.

15Ernest Hemingwaydistinctive writing style had an enormous influence on 20th-century fiction. PROSE*

Witnessed a munitions factory explode and had to carry mutilated bodies and body parts to a makeshift morgue; it was an immediate and powerful initiation into the horrors of war-Eventually the loyalist movement failed and the Franco led rebels won the war and installed a dictatorial government in the spring of 1939. Though his side lost the war Hemingway used his experiences there to write the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, a play titled "The Fifth Column" and several short stories.-After Hemingway began talking of suicide his Ketchum doctor agreed with Mary that they should seek expert help. He registered under the name of his personal doctor George Saviers and they began a medical program to try and repair his mental state. The Mayo Clinics treatment would ultimately lead to electro shock therapy. According to Jefferey Meyers Hemingway received "between 11 to 15 shock treatments that instead of helping him most certainly hastened his demise." One of the sad side effects of shock therapy is the loss of memory, and for Hemingway it was a catastrophic loss. Without his memory he could no longer write, could no longer recall the facts and images he required to create his art. Writing, which had already become difficult was now nearly impossible.Hemingway spent the first half of 1961 fighting his depression and paranoia, seeing enemies at every turn and threatening suicide on several more occasions. On the morning of July 2, 1961 Hemingway rose early, as he had his entire adult life, selected a shotgun from a closet in the basement, went upstairs to a spot near the entrance-way of the house and shot himself in the head. It was little more than two weeks until his 62nd birthday.

16John Dos Passoswrote forty-two novels, as well as poems, essays, and plays, and created more than 400 pieces of art

. The emotional and highly publicized case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a touchstone and rallying cry for American radicals.

The two Italian immigrants were accused in 1920 of murdering a paymaster in a holdup. Although the evidence against them was flimsy, they were readily convicted, in large part because they were immigrants and anarchists.

Despite international protests, they were executed on August 23, 1927. Novelist John Dos Passos became deeply involved in the case after he visited Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts prisons. The case and executions were commemorated in an outpouring of literary expression. Dos Passos returned to the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti in his epic three-volume work of fiction,U.S.A.In this excerpt, cops beat up the fictional character Mary French outside the Charlestown jail where Sacco and Vanzetti awaited their executions. Newsreel LXVI followed with a collage of contemporary headlines. Finally, The Camera Eye (50), a stream-of-consciousness montage, was Dos Passoss impassioned personal response.http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4986/

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Gertrude SteinStream of Consciousness

Art Collector and inspiration to the Avant Gardea younger friend from San Francisco who would remain her partner and secretary throughout her life. The couple did not return to the United States for over thirty years.

It was to Hemingway that Stein coined the phrase "the lost generation" to describe the expatriate writers living abroad between the wars.

By 1913, Stein's support of cubist painters and her increasingly avant-garde writing caused a split with her brother Leo, who moved to Florence. Her first book, Three Lives, was published in 1909. She followed it with Tender Buttons in 1914.

Ulysses , a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently

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