SEMINAR 12. XX CENTURY “LOST GENERATION” LITERATURE.

• American Modernism.

• World War I in the creative work of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway as a bard of “The Lost
generation”. The novel “Farewell to arms”. The principle “Meaning under the text” – ‘Iceberg Theory’.
The last period in the creative work of Hemingway. “The Old Man and the Sea”.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby”.

• Peculiarities of the creative work of William Faulkner. “The Snopes Trilogy”. South, psychology, time
problems in the novels of William Faulkner.

• Economic crisis of the 30ss and literature. “The Great Depression” Literature. Despair and expression
of ‘hope’ in the creative work of John Steinbeck. Erskine Preston Caldwell and his stories.

The Lost Generation 1920s

Though first intended to denote Americans brought to Europe by the First World War, the “Lost
Generation” refers to writers and other artists from the United States who took up residence in Paris in
the 1920s and 1930s. The words themselves were first attributed to Gertrude Stein by Ernest
Hemingway.

Why did the Lost Generation create literary modernism?

In one sense, Modernism was triggered through a series of cultural shocks. The first was the Great War,
which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World War One. The devastation and
disillusionment experienced by the Western Civilization after the WWI deepened Modernist thinking.

What are the characteristics of the lost generation?

Characteristics of "Lost Generation" Authors

Youthful idealism.

Sought the meaning of life.

Drank heavily.

Had love affairs.

Rejected modern American materialism.

Expatriates who lived in Paris.

Wrote novels considered literary masterpieces.

Which American modernist writer made the concept of lost generation?

Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though Hemingway made it widely known.

American modernism, much like the modernism movement in general, is a trend of philosophical
thought arising from the widespread changes in culture and society in the age of modernity. American
modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States beginning at the turn of the 20th
century, with a core period between World War I and World War II. Like its European counterpart,
American modernism stemmed from a rejection of Enlightenment thinking, seeking to better represent
reality in a new, more industrialized world.

American modernist literature

American modernist literature was a dominant trend in American literature between World War I and
World War II. The modernist era highlighted innovation in the form and language of poetry and prose, as
well as addressing numerous contemporary topics, such as race relations, gender and the human
condition. Many American modernists became expatriated in Europe during this time, often becoming
stalwarts in the European movement, as was the case for T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.
These writers were often known as the Lost Generation.

As a reaction to this trend, many American authors and poets began a trend of 'nativism', seeking to
represent the modern American experience in America. Notable contributors to this trend include
William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. These poets were often critical of the
works of expatriate writers such as Eliot and Pound, as evidenced by poems like Spring and All.

Influenced by the first World War, many American modernist writers explored the psychological wounds
and spiritual scars of the war experience. The economic crisis in America at the beginning of the 1930s
also left a mark on literature, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. A related issue is the loss of
self and need for self-definition, as workers faded into the background of city life, unnoticed cogs within
a machine yearning for self-definition. American modernists echoed the mid-19th-century focus on the
attempt to "build a self"—a theme illustrated by Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Madness and its
manifestations seems to be another favorite modernist theme, as seen in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor
Jones, Hemingway's The Battler and Faulkner's That Evening Sun. Nevertheless, all these negative
aspects led to new hopes and aspirations, and to the search for a new beginning, not only for the
contemporary individuals, but also for the fictional characters in American modernist literature.

Modernist literature also allowed for the development of regional trends within American literature,
including the Harlem Renaissance and southern modernism. The Harlem Renaissance marked a rebirth
for African American arts, centralized in the Harlem area of New York. Writers and thinkers such as Alain
Locke, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were among the key figures of the
movement. The movement was connected to a vogue for African American culture, as seen too in the
popularity of Jazz music, with many writers financed by white patrons. Many writers of this movement
used modernist techniques to represent African American life, for instance incorporating the rhythms of
Jazz music and dialects of African American culture into poetry and prose. Southern modernism similarly
represented the life and unique experiences of the South using modernist aesthetics, with celebrated
figures including William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams.
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and
journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong
influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and public image brought him
admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and
the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. He published seven novels, six
short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and
three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of
American literature.

Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was a reporter for a few months for
The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I.
In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for
his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).

In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris, where he worked as
a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s'
"Lost Generation" expatriate community. Hemingway's debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in
1926. He divorced Richardson in 1927, and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned
from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), which he covered as a journalist and which was the basis for his
novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn
separated after he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. Hemingway was present with Allied
troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.

He maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida (in the 1930s) and in Cuba (in the 1940s and
1950s). He almost died in 1954 after two plane crashes on successive days, with injuries leaving him in
pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where,
in mid-1961, he died by suicide.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist,
essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of
the Jazz Age—a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections,
and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s,
Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest
American writers of the 20th century.

Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York
state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson.
Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to
join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a
Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially
rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him
after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural
sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To
maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday
Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he
befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including
Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but
was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut,
The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the
deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia,
Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).

Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression,
Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter.
While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his
death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at
44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941),
after Fitzgerald's death.

William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ˈfɔːknər/; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer
known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette
County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. A Nobel Prize laureate, Faulkner is one of the
most celebrated writers of American literature and is considered the greatest writer of Southern
literature.

Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner's family moved to Oxford, Mississippi when he was a young
child. With the outbreak of World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but did not serve in
combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before
dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). He went
back to Oxford and wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In
1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The following year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Seeking greater
economic success, he went to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter.

Faulkner's renown reached its peak upon the publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner
and his being awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate.
Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Faulkner died from a heart attack on July 6, 1962, following a fall from his horse the prior month.

John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (/ˈstaɪnbɛk/; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer
and the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature winner "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as
they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception." He has been called "a giant of American
letters."

During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts,
including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for
the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden
(1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary
canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies.

Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California
Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as
applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.

Erskine Preston Caldwell (December 17, 1903 – April 11, 1987) was an American novelist and short story
writer. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native Southern United States, in
novels such as Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933) won him critical acclaim.

Early years

Caldwell was born on December 17, 1903, in the small town of White Oak, Coweta County, Georgia. He
was the only child of Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church minister Ira Sylvester Caldwell and his
wife Caroline Preston (née Bell) Caldwell, a schoolteacher. Rev. Caldwell's ministry required moving the
family often, to places including Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina. When
he was 15 years old, his family settled in Wrens, Georgia. His mother Caroline was from Virginia. Her
ancestry included English nobility which held large land grants in eastern Virginia. Both her English
ancestors and Scots-Irish ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Ira Caldwell's ancestors were
Scots-Irish and had also been in America since before the revolution and had fought in it.

Caldwell's mother, a former teacher, tutored her son at home. Caldwell was 14 when he first attended a
school.

Caldwell attended but did not graduate from Erskine College, a Presbyterian school in nearby South
Carolina.

Career

He dropped out of Erskine College to sign aboard a boat supplying guns to Central America.Caldwell
entered the University of Virginia with a scholarship from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, but
was enrolled for only a year. Caldwell then worked, being a football player, being a bodyguard and
selling "bad" real estate.

After two more enrollments at college, Caldwell went to work for the Atlanta Journal, leaving in 1925,
after a year, then moving to Maine, staying for five years, producing a story that won a Yale Review
award for fiction, and two novels of the Georgia poor.

His first published works were The Bastard (1929) and Poor Fool (1930) but the works for which he is
most famous are his novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933). His first book, The
Bastard, was banned and copies of it were seized by authorities. With the publication of God's Little
Acre, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice instigated legal action against him, for The
Bastard. Caldwell was arrested at a book-signing there but was exonerated in court.

In 1941, Caldwell reported from the USSR, for Life magazine, CBS radio and the newspaper PM. He
wrote movie scripts for about five years. Caldwell wrote articles from Mexico and Czechoslovakia for the
North American Newspaper Alliance.

Personal life

Through the 1930s Caldwell and his first wife Helen managed a bookstore in Maine. Following their
divorce Caldwell married photographer Margaret Bourke-White, collaborating with her on three photo-
documentaries: You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), North of the Danube (1939), and Say, Is This The USA
(1941). During World War II, Caldwell obtained a visa from the USSR that allowed him to travel to
Ukraine and work as a foreign correspondent, documenting the war effort there.

After he returned from World War II, Caldwell took up residence in Connecticut, then in Arizona with
third wife, June Johnson (J.C. Martin). In 1957, Caldwell married Virginia Moffett Fletcher Caldwell Hibbs,
who had drawn illustrations for a recent book of his, moving to Twin Peaks in San Francisco, later
moving to Paradise Valley, Arizona, in 1977. During the last twenty years of his life, his routine was to
travel the world for six months of each year, taking with him notebooks in which to jot down his ideas.
Many of these notebooks were not published, but can be examined in a museum dedicated to him in
the town square of Moreland, Georgia, where the home in which he was born was relocated and
dedicated to his memory.

"I live outside San Francisco. That's not exactly the United States"

Caldwell, a heavy smoker, died from complications of emphysema and lung cancer on April 11, 1987, in
Paradise Valley, Arizona. He is buried in Scenic Hills Memorial Park, Ashland, Oregon. Although he never
lived there, his stepson and fourth wife, Virginia Moffett Fletcher Caldwell Hibbs, did, and wished him to
be buried near his family. Virginia died in December 2017 aged 98.

Adam Hunter Caldwell's grandfather is Erskine Caldwell. He is a Fine Arts instructor at Academy of Art
University.

Politics

His political sympathies were with the working class, and he used his experiences with farmers and
common workers to write stories portraying their lives and struggles. Later in life he presented public
seminars on the typical conditions of tenant-sharecroppers in the South.

Disillusionment with the government led Caldwell to compose a short story published in 1933, "Sylvia".
In this story a woman journalist is executed by a firing squad after being tried in a secret court on
charges of espionage.

Works
Caldwell wrote 25 novels, 150 short stories, twelve nonfiction collections, two autobiographies, and two
books for young readers. He also edited the influential American Folkways series, a 28-volume series of
books about different regions of the United States.