Movements and schools
The Lost Generation
Disillusioned Americans after 1918, often based in Paris.
The phrase is Gertrude Stein's, who told Hemingway that his generation was lost: those who were twenty in 1918 came back from the front without beliefs and found no place in prosperous America. Many settled in Paris, where the exchange rate was favourable and prohibition unknown. They wrote dry sentences, stripped of commentary, and parties that ring hollow: the green light at the end of Gatsby's dock, Hemingway's ambulance on the Italian front, the monologue of an idiot in Faulkner.
works 6
- PoetryTulips and ChimneysE. E. Cummings · 1923This collection puts typographical layout on the same level as the word and makes it carry part of the meaning.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelThe Great GatsbyFrancis Scott Fitzgerald · 1925The post-war years see a new fortune settle beside an old fortune that despises it. This novel watches a man who made the first in order to approach the second.Literature
- NovelA Farewell to ArmsErnest Hemingway · 1929War is still written in the language of proclamations, with its sacred and glorious words. This novel holds that abstract words are obscene beside the names of villages.Literature
- NovelThe Sound and the FuryWilliam Faulkner · 1929This novel tells the story of a single Mississippi family through four voices, out of chronological order, and leaves the reader to piece it together.Literature
- NovelThe 42nd ParallelJohn Dos Passos · 1930This novel builds its country by accumulation, mixing fiction, documents and popular song.Literature
- NarrativeThe Autobiography of Alice B. ToklasGertrude Stein · 1933Known for a prose based on repetition that few read, Gertrude Stein here writes in the simplest language, and under the voice of another.Literature