The Great Gatsby The Lost Generation

The First World War tore up the established C19th Victorian views held among common moralists. The Russian Revolution (1917) stirred up the hatred towards the current social systems among the youth. The booming of American industry with its gigantic roaring factories, its impersonality, and its large scale aggressiveness, no longer left any room for the code of polite behavior and well-bred morality fashioned in a quiet and less competitive age. It was during that period that a number of sensitive writers found that since there was little remedy for a country that was blind and deaf to everything save the glint and ring of the dollar, the only way out was to emigrate to Europe. There they began to think of themselves in the words of Gertrude Stein, as the “ Lost Generation. ” The History

Although the form and ideas of modern American literature had clearly began to emerge in the first decade of the century, the First World War stands as a great dividing line between the 19th century and contemporary America. Writers of the first postwar self consciously acknowledged that was, as Ezra Pound described it, “an old bitch gone in the teeth.” Yet in the years between the two world wars American literature achieved a new diversity and reached its greatest heights. The publication in 1922 of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land helped to establish a modern tradition of literature rich learning and all usive thought. The Literature. The rise of the modern American literature

In 1920 Sinclair Lewis published his memorable denunciation of American small-town provincialism Main Street, and in the same year Theodore Dreiser began writing his masterpiece of naturalism, An American Tragedy. F. Scott Fitzgerald summarized the experiences and attitudes of the decade in his short stories and in his novel The Great Gatsby. Earnest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and William Faulkner published one of the most influential American novels of the age, The Sun and the Fury. During the twenty years between the two world wars six American writers who did their best and most original work won the Nobel Price for literature. The Literature. The rise of the modern American literature

War disfigures and tears away precious lives. Its horrors embed themselves like an infectious disease in the minds of the survivors, who, when left to salvage the pieces of their former existences, are brushed into obscurity by the individuals attempting to justify the annihilation of the world that was. The era following World War I epitomizes the inheritance of tribulation and sorrow for the generation that remains to retrieve some form of happiness - the lost generation. The Sun Also Rises will maintain a place in history not only for its literary merit, but also for its documentation of what writer Gertrude Stein called the "Lost Generation." The Lost Generation of The Roaring Twenties

After WWI, many young Americans left their native country, bitter over the war and seeking adventure. A circle of artistic expatriates appeared-- among them Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, and Pablo Picasso. Hemingway and Fitzgerald employed their keen social observation in writing The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, respectively, widely considered the two masterpieces of Lost Generation fiction. The Lost Generation of The Roaring Twenties