4. These writers were from the United States, but most of
themmoved to Paris, where they started a new literary
movement that captured the spirit of the times.
5. The term “lost generation” comes from something Gertrude
Stein had overheard being said to a car mechanic:
“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.”
6. After experiencing the horrors of the First World War,
watching the government ignore their veterans, witnessing
the job market change due to an influx of immigrants, and
seeing the previous generation start to push for Prohibition,
they became distrustful of authority and government.
7. They were called the lost generation
because they rejected the traditional
values of their parents’ generation,
going their own way and often
pursuing nomadic lifestyles of
decadence and debauchery.
9. Some characteristics of lost generation literature include:
1. The idea of finding one’s own way in life and making
one’s own mark on the world; individualism.
2. Decadence and debauchery, hedonistic lifestyles.
3. Disillusionment with the world and cynical attitudes.
10. Some characteristics of lost generation literature include:
4. Moral loss; aimlessness.
5. A loss of romance due to realism or cynicism.
11. “Iron Youth. Youth! We are none
of us more than twenty years old.
But
Young? Youth? That is long ago.
We are old folk.”
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet
on the
Western Front.
12. “You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get
precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink
yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your
time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see?”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.
13. “If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm
world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
[…] A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts,
breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about […]”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
14. “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and
repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
15. “One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly
into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade
and wither dismally with age.”
James Joyce, Dubliners.
