The Lost Generation What is the Lost Generation

The Lost Generation

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.

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

Hemingway Classics include

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

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.

http: //images. google. com/imgres? imgurl=http: //www. artandstylemagazine. com/i. BAW 247. jpg&imgrefurl=http: // www. artandstylemagazine. com/fabulous_times. htm&h =400&w=320 &sz=81&tbnid=Lx. PONq. Ja. FDBUTM: &tbnh=120&tbnw=96&hl=en&start=12&prev=/images%3 Fq%3 DGertrude%2 BStein%2 Band%2 BHemingway%26 svnum%3 D 10%26 hl%3 Den %26 lr%3 D%26 sa%3 DG Artists in Paris, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Hemingway

John Dos Passos

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).

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).

http: //images. google. com/imgres? imgurl=http: //www. cnn. com/SPECIALS/books/1999/hemingway/stories/legend/6. toed. cat. jpg&imgrefurl=http: //www. cnn. com/SPECIALS/books/1 999/hemingway/stories/legend/&h=213&w=175&sz=10&tbnid=x. Ldc. PXFZUG 26 v. M: &tbnh=101&tbnw=82&hl= en&start=3&prev=/images%3 Fq%3 DHemingway%2 Bhome%2 BKey% 2 BWest%2 Bcats%26 svnum%3 D 10%26 hl%3 Den%26 lr%3 D

Ernest Hemingway's Six Toed Cats • http: //images. google. com/imgres? imgurl=http: //www. myfloridatrips. com/hemingway/thumbs/hemingway_cats_key_west_101. jpg&imgrefurl=http: // www. myfloridatrips. com/ hemingway/cats. html&h=93&w=125&sz=4&tbnid=Ht. LU 6 SDVp. YVMa. M: &tbnh=62&tbnw=84&hl= en&start=19&prev=/images%3 Fq%3 DHemingway%2 Bhome%2 BKey%2 B West%2 Bcats%26 svnum%3 D 10%26 hl%3 Den%26 lr%3 D 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").

Ernest Hemingway The 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.

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.

Hemingway

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.

Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald

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.

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. "

Virginia Wolfe

Virginia Woolf (1882 -1941) • Virginia Woolf (1882 -1941) is now generally recognized as the author of two of the twentieth century’s 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 interior—and not always logical—movement of thoughts that make up the better part of most people’s psyches.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolfe

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-

The text http: //etext. library. adelaide. edu. au/w/woolf/v irginia/w 91 md • Mrs. Dalloway • by • Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway • Woolf’s 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,

Clarissa • Clarissa’s 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.

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 Clarissa’s, but who in many ways can be read as a male parallel.

FROM Mrs. 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. . "

http: //www. bl. uk/onlinegallery/themes/englishlit/virginiawoolf. html • At the link above: This working draft for one of Virginia Woolf’s 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.

The Hours (movie)

The Hours

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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The Lost Generation The End