The Lost Generation

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The Lost Generation
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What is the Lost Generation?

• Seeking the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the
  values of American materialism,
• a number of intellectuals, poets,
• artists
• and writers
• fled to France in the post World War I years.
• Paris was the center of it all.

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• http//www.redcross.org/article/0,1072,0_332_4160,
  00.html

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Hemingway Classics include
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The Lost Generation writers

• The Lost Generation writers all gained prominence
  in 20th century literature.
• Their innovations challenged assumptions about
  writing and expression,
• and paved the way for subsequent generations of
  writers.

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Gertrude Stein Ernest Hemingway

• American poet Gertrude Stein actually coined the
  expression "lost generation." Speaking to Ernest
  Hemingway, she said, "you are all a lost
  generation."
• The term stuck and the mystique surrounding these
  individuals continues to fascinate us.

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Artists in Paris, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound
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The three best known

• There were many literary artists involved in the
  groups known as the Lost Generation.
• The three best known are F. Scott Fitzgerald,
  Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.
• Others usually included among the list are
  Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford
  Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Hemingway
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John Dos Passos

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John Dos Passos

• Dos Passos left university to join the
• Allied war effort in Europe. He served as an
  ambulance driver
• in France and Italy during the First World War
• and afterwards drew upon these experiences
• in his novels,
• One Man's Initiation (1920)
• and
• Three Soldiers (1921).

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Politics

• Dos Passos was active in the campaign against the
  growth of fascism in Europe. He joined other
  literary figures such as Dashiell Hammett,
  Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman and Ernest
  Hemingway in supporting the Republicans during
  the Spanish Civil War. However Dos Passos
  gradually became disillusioned with left-wing
  politics and this is reflected in his novels, The
  Adventures of a Young Man (1939) and Number One
  (1943).

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Ernest Hemingway'sSix Toed Cats

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Today, approximately 60 cats, half of them
polydactyl, make their home in the Ernest
Hemingway Museum and Home, in Key West, protected
and taken care of by the terms of his will.
Ernest Hemingway was a cat-lover. He admired
their spirit and independence, and often wrote
about them. Hemingway was given a special six
toed cat from a ship's captain, and from that
cat the legends of Hemingway's cats have
grown. This cat, which may have been a Maine
Coon, had extra toes (technically known as
polydactyl, latin for "many digits").

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Ernest HemingwayThe Lost Generation's leader in
the adaptation of the naturalistic technique in
the novel

• Ernest Hemingway was the Lost Generation's leader
  in the adaptation of the naturalistic technique
  in the novel.
• Hemingway volunteered to fight with the Italians
  in World War I and his Midwestern American
  ignorance was shattered during the resounding
  defeat of the Italians by the Central Powers at
  Caporetto.

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War time experiences

• Newspapers of the time reported Hemingway, with
  dozens of pieces of shrapnel in his legs, had
  heroically carried another man out.
• That episode even made the newsreels in America.
• These war time experiences laid the groundwork
  of his novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929). Another
  of his books, The Sun Also Rises (1926) was a
  naturalistic and shocking expression of post-war
  disillusionment.

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Hemingway
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F. Scott Fitzgerald

• F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered as the
  portrayer of the spirit of the Jazz age.
• Though not strictly speaking an expatriate, he
  roamed Europe and visited North Africa, but
  returned to the US occasionally.
• Fitzgerald had at least two addresses in Paris
  between 1928 and 1930. He fulfilled the role of
  chronicler of the prohibition era.

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Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald
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The free spirited Fitzgerald

• His first novel, This Side of Paradise became a
  best-seller. But when first published,
• The Great Gatsby on the other hand, sold only
  25,000 copies.
• The free spirited Fitzgerald, certain it would be
  a big hit, blew the publisher's advance money
  leasing a villa in Cannes.
• In the end, he owed his publishers, Scribners,
  money. Fitzgerald's Gatsby is the story of a
  somewhat refined and wealthy bootlegger whose
  morality is contrasted with the hypocritical
  attitude of most of his acquaintances. Many
  literary critics consider Gatsby his best work.

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The impact of the war on the group of writers in
the Lost Generation is aptly demonstrated by a
passage from Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night
(1933)

• "This land here cost twenty lives a foot that
  summer...See that little stream--we could walk to
  it in two minutes. It took the British a month to
  walk it--a whole empire walking very slowly,
  dying in front and pushing forward behind.
• And another empire walked very slowly backward a
  few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million
  bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again
  in this generation."

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Virginia Wolfe
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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

• Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is now generally
  recognized as the author of two of the twentieth
  centurys greatest literary works,
• To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, both of
  which employ a style of narration that has come
  to be known as "stream of consciousness," which
  focuses on the interiorand not always
  logicalmovement of thoughts that make up the
  better part of most peoples psyches.

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Mrs. Dallowayby Virginia Wolfe
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http//www.flp.com/films/mrs_dalloway/
Mrs Dalloway is the story of one day in the life
of the heroine in which the impingement of past
on present consciousness enables her to tell the
whole of Mrs Dalloway's past by naturally
developing flashbacks within consciousness.
Vanessa Redgrave starring in the movie, Mrs.
Dalloway--
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The text http//etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/w
oolf/virginia/w91md

• Mrs. Dalloway
• by
• Virginia Woolf

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Mrs. Dalloway

• Woolfs 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is about the
  casualties of early twentieth-century life, and
  she explores the gendered forms of mental
  illness, and the social repercussions of
  feminism, homosexuality and colonialism.
• The central consciousness is that of the title
  character, Clarissa Dalloway, on the day of a
  dinner party that she is giving. Moving through
  the relatively uneventful preparations, the
  arrival of the guests, and the rituals of hosting
  a party,

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Clarissa

• Clarissas thoughts wander across past, present
  and future. Throughout the relatively mundane
  actions through which the book follows her, she
  is slowly revealed by means of her interior
  monologues of memory and reflection to be a most
  interesting person who has been squeezed by
  society into a rather ordinary role.

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Septimus

• The narrative broadens to include others in her
  life, most notably Septimus Warren Smith, a
  shell-shock victim whose life has had no direct
  connection to Clarissas, but who in many ways
  can be read as a male parallel.

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FROMMrs. Dalloway By Virginia Woolf

• "Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking
  towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must
  inevitably cease completely? All this must go on
  without her did she resent it or did it not
  somehow become consoling to believe that death
  ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets
  of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here,
  there, she survived...."

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http//www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/themes/englishlit/v
irginiawoolf.html

• At the link above This working draft for one of
  Virginia Woolfs most admired novels dates from
  1924. Originally called The Hours, it was
  published the following year as Mrs Dalloway.
  Woolf is acclaimed as an innovator of the English
  language.
• Here, in her own handwriting, we see her explore
  a new style of writing called stream of
  consciousness, in which the imprint of
  experience and emotion on the inner lives of
  characters is as important as the stories they
  act out.

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The Hours(movie)
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The Hours
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Stream of Consciousness

• Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an
  ordinary day.
• The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial,
  fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the
  sharpness of steel.

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Stream of Consciousness

• From all sides they come, an incessant shower of
  innumerable atoms
• and as they fall, as they shape themselves into
  the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
  differently
• from of old.Virginia Woolf, in an essay on
  'Modern Fiction'

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• .

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The Lost Generation The End