The Lost Generation
Each generation has a moniker to follow it. The earliest generation in American history would be the “Awakening Generation,” a name given to those Americans born between the years 1701 to 1723. The most famous of all generations is the “Greatest Generation,” they are the generation that fought and won World War II. The Greatest Generation is also the parent to the second most famous generation, the “Baby Boomers.” It was with the Boomers that the hippy-free-love and peace can be found. The name for any generation can be found in the music, fads, inventions, and wars specific to each period of time. However, this is not true for the generation coming of age following the first World War, the “Lost Generation.”
The term “Lost Generation” was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, Sylvia Beach, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein herself. It would be Hemingway who would popularize the term, quoting Stein, “You are all a lost generation,” as an epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises.
The “Lost Generation” were said to be disillusioned by the large number of casualties of the Great World War, cynical, disdainful of the Victorian notions of morality and propriety of their elders. It was somewhat common among members of this group to complain that American artistic culture lacked the extensiveness of European work, which lead to many members spending large amounts of time in Europe. They also complained that all topics worth treating in a literary work had already been covered. No matter, this period would see an explosion in American literature and art, which is now considered to include some of the greatest literary classics produced by American writers. This generation also produced the first flowering of jazz music, arguably the first distinct American art form. The enriching gifts from the Lost Generation included: The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot), The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway), Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis), The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner), “An American in Paris” (George Gershwin), the comedy routine of “Who’s on First?” by Abbott and Costello, among many others. For the topic of this paper, the Lost Generation will be those that came together in Paris during the 1920s, and two of their American contemporaries.
The story begins with a woman known in literary history as Sylvia Beach. She was born Nancy Woodbridge Beach on March 14, 1887 in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father was a Presbyterian pastor whose work took the family to Paris in 1901 (Beach 4). Beach loved Paris, and went to live there permanently in 1917 after working as a nurse in World War I. With her friend Adrienne Monnier she founded a bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. They opened for business on November 19, 1919 and immediately became a focal point for Americans (Beach 20). The bookshop gained fame after it published James Joyce’s Ulysses on February 22, 1922, after the inability for Joyce to get his book published in English-speaking countries (Beach 84). Ulysses was consequently banned in the United States and United Kingdom.
Beach and her little bookshop would become famous for not only publishing Joyce’s Ulysses, but for the regular patrons that visited her shop. In 1956, Beach wrote Shakespeare and Company, a memoir of the inter-war years that detailed the cultural life of Paris at the time. The book contains first-hand observations of D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and many others. In the book Beach details that not only the good times at Shakespeare and Company, but also the difficult experienced throughout the depression of the 1930s. By 1936 Beach was considering closing the doors for good at Shakespeare and Company, this all changed when a group of French and a few American writers band together and formed a committee who took turns reading at the bookshop their unpublished works. In order to be able to attend these readings subscribers would pay two hundred francs a year for two years, they were known as the Friends of Shakespeare and Company (Beach 210).
As the war got closer to Paris, Beach found herself struggling to stay open again. People were fleeing the city, and Beach was seen as the enemy among the Germans who would stop by. As an American she was forced to register once a week at the Commissary in the section of Paris where she lived. Beach writes, “There were so few Americans that our names were in a sort of scrapbook that was always getting mislaid” (215). It took only one event that closed the doors to Shakespeare and Company forever for Beach. A high ranking German officer stopped by to purchase Beach’s last copy of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which Beach denied him the purchase of. A few days later, the same officer returned looking for the book and by this time, Beach had safely put the book away. At that time Beach was informed that he would be returning to confiscate the bookshop. With the help of a few friends and in two hours time, all the books and furniture was removed from Shakespeare and Company, fixtures taken down and the sign out front painted over. As Beach wrote, “Did the Germans come to confiscate Shakespeare and Company’s goods? If so, they never found the shop” (216). It was December 1941. The Germans did come for Beach and she would spend six months in an internment camp. The shop was symbolically liberated by Ernest Hemingway in person in 1944 but never re-opened. Beach would remain in Paris until her death, her body then would be returned to the United States were she would be buried in Princeton Cemetery. Her papers are now archived at Princeton University.
In 1951, American George Whitman opened a new English-language bookshop named, Le Mistral, in Paris’ left bank. Just like Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, the shop served as a focal point for literary culture for the bohemian Persians and returning Americans. In the 1950's, the shop served as a base for many of the writers of the beat generation like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs. After the death of Beach in 1962, Whitman changed the name back to Shakespeare and Company. More importantly, and something Beach did not do, Whitman invites people to live in the shop from its very first days. All that is asked of you is to make your bed in the morning, help out in the shop, and read a book a day.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The influence of Hemingway’s writings on American literature was considerable and continues today. His distinctive writing style is characterized by terse minimalism and understatement and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth century fiction. Hemingway’s protagonists are on average stoics, often seen as projections of his own character, where men who must show a grace under pressure persona. Heading into the 21st century, many of Hemingway’s works are now considered classics in the canon of American literature. His influence of style has been so widespread that it can be glimpsed in most contemporary fiction, as writers draw inspiration either from Hemingway himself or indirectly through writers who more consciously emulated Hemingway’s style. In his own time, Hemingway affected writers within his modernist literary circle. Hemingway’s to the point writing style is known to have inspired Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and many other Generation X writers. Hemingway’s style also influenced Jack Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers. J.D. Salinger is said to have wanted to be a great American short story writer in the same vein as Hemingway. Hunter S. Thompson often compared himself to Hemingway, and the short Hemingway-esque sentences can be found in The Rum Diary.
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Two of Hemingway’s many acclaimed short stories are “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “Soldier’s Home.” Kilimanjaro tells the story of a writer, Harry, and his memories after taking a safari in Africa. Harry develops a gangrenous wound from a thorn prick and lies powerless awaiting his slow death. This loss of physical capability causes him to look inside himself, his memories of the past years and how little he has actually accomplished in his writing. Harry realizes that although he has seen and experienced many wonderful and astonishing things during his lifetime, he had never made a record of the events, that his status as a writer is contradicted by his reluctance to actually write. He also quarrels with the woman with him, blaming her for his living decadently and forgetting his failure to write of what really matters to him, namely his experiences among poor and interesting people, not the predictable upper class crowd he has fallen in with lately. Thus Harry dies, having lived through so much and yet having lived only for the moment, with no regard to the future. According to author Arthur Waldhorn, “The Snows yields more than a simplistic life message: a corrupt life breeds a corrupt death” (146).
A Soldier’s Home tells the story of a soldier’s return from World War I and how he is mentally scarred by his experiences. The story explores the effect of the war on Harold Krebs and his apparent numbness to the world around him. A Soldier’s Home is not only a commentary on the horrible aspects of war and the human psyche, but also a commentary on society’s attitudes towards war. This is shown through the actions of the other characters in relation to Krebs, and their efforts to change him (Waldhorn 37).
The sacrifice that Krebs made for his country is never appreciated during the story. After the war, there was a celebration and immediately afterwards the soldiers were expected to rejoin society and be productive members, essentially denying that the event even happened. Krebs is thrust back into his capitalist society, where the atrocities of the war are never questioned or reviled. The war has removed any semblance of humanity from Krebs, who can not relate to anyone, even his own mother who’s not interested in his sacrifice. Krebs deals with his sister abstractly, but is appreciative of her innocence as a young child. Krebs sees himself as a unit, a soldier, and can not re-attain his feelings. His speech is void of description, and refers to himself as one does in the army, by his last name. This makes Soldier’s Home not only a commentary on how war can dehumanize the human mind, but also an exploration of how society reacts to this new mind in an industrialist manner.
Hemingway took his own life on the morning of July 2, 1961, just three weeks short of his sixty-second birthday with a shotgun blast to the head. Judged not mentally responsible for his action of suicide, he was buried with a Roman Catholic service. Unlike Harry in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway was not willing to wait for death. It was also in Kilimanjaro that Hemingway poked fun at an F. Scott Fitzgerald, calling him out on his need for money and recognition.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896. Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. He would write four novels, leave a fifth unfinished, and write dozens of short stories with the common themes of youth, despair, and age. Many admire what they consider his remarkable emotional honesty. His heroes were handsome, confident, and doomed, blazing brilliantly before exploding, his heroines are usually beautiful, intricate, and alluring.
The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald’s development. The Great Gatsby was first published on April 10, 1926, and set in New York City and Long Island during the 1920s. The novel was not popular when it was first published, selling fewer than 24,000 copies during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. Largely forgotten due to the Great Depression and then World War II, it was republished in the 1950s and quickly found a wide readership (Bruccoli 492). Over the following decades the novel has emerged as a standard text in high school and university courses in literature around the world, and is often cited as one of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th Century, as well as one of the greatest American literature pieces ever written.
The story centers around Jay Gatsby, the title character, who is a young millionaire with a mysterious and somewhat notorious past. He’s famous for throwing glamorous parties attended by high society. Gatsby has no ties to the society of the rich in which he circulates and is a lonely man. All he really wants is to repeat the past, and that’s to be reunited with the love of his life, Daisy. The reader learns that Daisy is the primary reason he pursued a life of money, the other being that he wanted to escape from the life of his father, poverty. But Daisy has moved on and is married to respectable millionaire Tom Buchanan.
The narrator is Nick Carraway, an apprentice Wall Street trader in the rising financial markets of the early 1920s, who is also Daisy’s second cousin. Carraway lives in the small bungalow next to the mansion owned by Gatsby. He quickly meets and befriends Gatsby, and thus becomes the liaison between him and Daisy. Carraway is cynical of the rich, as respectable as they may seem superficially; he feels that they are careless people. One afternoon, after a confrontation between Tom and Gatsby over Gatsby’s love for Daisy, as well as Gatsby’s past actions and present intentions, Daisy runs over Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, while driving back from the city with Gatsby in Gatsby’s bright yellow car. Tom misleads Myrtle’s heartbroken husband George, implying that the accident was Gatsby’s fault to punish Tom for marrying Daisy. In a fit of rage, George goes to Gatsby’s house with his gun, shoots Gatsby and then commits suicide. Hardly anyone, even Daisy, attends Gatsby’s funeral. Carraway, Gatsby’s sole friend, attends with Gatsby’s father, a poor farmer. Gatsby is buried with the same mystery in which he suddenly appeared. At the end of the book, Carraway decides to move back out West, as he feels that the East is too corrupt for him. He is left to ponder The American Dream and what it is that makes us continue to strive for our goals.
The themes Fitzgerald uses with the American dream and the focus on the wealthy citizens of America, the notion of opulence with the attempt to gain wealth is apparent through Gatsby’s extravagant and lavish parties. This also carried over into Fitzgerald’s own life (Bruccoli 220). While his passion lay in writing novels, they never sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and his wife, Zelda, adopted as New York celebrities. To support this lifestyle, Fitzgerald turned to writing short stories submitting them to magazines and was frequently in financial trouble and often required loans from his literary agent and his editor at Scribner’s (Bruccoli 460).
Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940 and on the night of December 20, 1940 he had his second heart attack. He would die the following day and died at the age of 44. Fitzgerald’s funeral was attended by few people. Among the attendants was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured, “The poor son of a bitch,” a line from Jay Gatsby’s funeral in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. While Gatsby was written early on in Fitzgerald’s career, it was also at a time that kept a mentor of sorts, Sherwood Anderson.
Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio on September 13, 1876. Growing up, Anderson and his family moved around frequently before finally settling in Clyde, Ohio. An American writer, mainly of short stories, probably his most famous collection of works, which he began in 1915, was Winesburg, Ohio (Morris 7).
Published in 1919, it is a collection of related short stories, which could be loosely defined as a novel. The stories are centered on the central character George Willard and the fictional inhabitants of the town of Winesburg, Ohio. As a child Anderson grew up in Clyde, Ohio, and Clyde would serve as the model for his fictional town of Winesburg. The work explores the theme of loneliness and frustration in small-town America. Anderson’s writing often seems disjointed and tentative, a style that lends itself to the half-conscious thoughts and raw emotions of Winesburg’s residents and their inability to express their deepest hopes and fears. The townspeople are grotesques, stunted morally, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and they are inarticulate (Morris 15). They seem to gravitate toward George, telling him their strange, often sad, stories in the hope that, in writing the stories of their lives, he will be able to impart dignity and meaning to their personal struggles and experiences.
The prose of Winesburg is often characterized by a colloquial naturalness which Anderson might have learned from such oral story tellers as his father or Mark Twain, a favorite author of his (Morris 56). Anderson himself said Winesburg “has become a kind of American classic and has been said by many critics to have started a kind of revolution in American short-story writing” (Morris 9). The critical reception to Winesburg, Ohio upon its publication was positive, but it did not receive a wide readership. Some people have regarded Anderson as an “American Freudian” and insisted that he was influenced by Freud because Winesburg dealt with frustration and repression, often of normal sexual desires (Morris 57). Among the literati, it was very highly regarded, but its sales were modest. It is now regarded as one of the finest American novels of the 20th century, comparing his themes to those of T.S. Eliot.
Anderson would die in Panama after swallowing a toothpick that ruptured the lining in his stomach. His body was flown back to the States and buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia. A telegram appearing in the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram announcing Anderson’s death said, “Sherwood Anderson, Former Elyria Manufacturer, Dies.” Author Ann Morris wrote, Anderson’s “one fine accomplishment was Winesburg, Ohio, a moving narrative about the inarticulate men and women in small towns all over America” (Morris 8).
T.S. Eliot was born Thomas Stearns Eliot on September 26, 1888, into a prominent family from St. Louis, Missouri. He would go on to become a transplanted American poet, dramatist, and literary critic residing in England. His works consisted of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, which are all considered defining achievements of twentieth century Modernist poetry. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize for literature “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.”
Of all of Eliot’s poetry, he is well known for his long poem The Waste Land that he wrote during his first marriage to a Cambridge governess, Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Of the marriage Eliot wrote: “I came to persuade myself that I was in love with [Vivienne] simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her the marriage brought no happiness. To me it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land” (Cox 16). The Waste Land is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation.
The Waste Land is a highly influential 433-line modernist poem, it is perhaps the most famous and most written about long poem of the 20th century, dealing with the decline of civilization and the impossibility of recovering meaning in life. With its slippage between satire and prophecy with abrupt changes of speakers, locations, and times, the melancholic and intimidating summoning up of a vast and unsympathetic range of cultures and literatures. To showcase this, the poem is broken up into five sections: “The Burial of the Dead,” “A Game of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon,” “Death by Water,” and “What the Thunder Said.” The first four sections of the poem correspond to the Greek classical elements of Earth (burial), Air (voices), Fire (passion), and Water. In October 1922, Eliot would get The Waste Land published in The Criterion, and then in book form by December 1922.
The largest form of criticism about Eliot’s Waste Land came as being called not real poetry. Another critique concerned Eliot’s widespread use of quotes from other authors into his work. Notes at the end of Waste Land give the source of many of the quotes, but not all, reinforcing the argument that Eliot is a plagiarizer. This has been defended as a necessary salvaging of tradition in an age of fragmentation, and completely integral to the work, as well adding richness through unexpected juxtaposition.
Many famous writers and critics have paid tribute to Eliot, but it was probably said best by poet Ted Hughes, husband of poet Sylvia Plath, “Each year [since] Eliot’s presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble” (Cox 235). One who was humble in the second half of his life as he was on his spiritual journey was D.H. Lawrence.
Born David Herbert Lawrence on September 11, 1885, D.H. became one of the most important, prolific and controversial English writers of the 20th century, whose output spans novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. These works, taken together, represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. In them Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behavior.
Throughout his life Lawrence’s unsettling opinions earned him many enemies and hardships, official persecution, censorship and the misrepresentation of his work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in voluntary exile. At the time of his death his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. Today he is viewed with clearer eyes as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
Arguably Lawrence’s most controversial writings can be found in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Printed privately in Florence in 1928, it was not printed in the United Kingdom until 1960. The publication of the book caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes, including previously banned four-letter words, and perhaps even because the lovers were a working-class male and a bourgeois female.
When the book was finally published in Britain in 1960, it was done as a result of a not guilty verdict. The trial brought against the publishers, Penguin Books, under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 for publishing a “cheap, widely available book” (Lawrence xiv). The trial was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 Act had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. In Australia, not only was the book itself banned, but a book describing the British trial was also banned. A copy was smuggled into the country, and then published widely. The fallout from this event eventually led to lifting the ban of censorship of books in the country. The United States had a different trial; here it was a trio of books, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill. The ban was overturned in court allowing all three books to be published and distributed. Trials of Indecency and ban on books would affect another writer and friend of Lawrence’s, James Joyce.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882 in Dublin, Ireland. Joyce would become known as an expatriate Irish writer and poet, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. While most of his adult life was spent outside the country, Joyce’s Irish experiences are vital to his writings and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter.
In 1906, as Joyce was completing work on Dubliners, he considered adding another story featuring a character named Leopold Bloom under the title Ulysses. The story was not written, but the idea stayed with Joyce and, in 1914, he started work on a novel completing the rough draft in October of 1921. Thanks to literary Ezra Pound, serial publication of the novel was sought in the magazine The Little Review in 1918. Unfortunately, this would lead to censorship of the book in the United States with the editors being convicted of publishing obscenity when a group called the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, objected to the book’s content and took action to keep the book out of the United States. At trial in 1921 the magazine Little Review was declared obscene and as a result Ulysses was banned in the United States. The novel would remain banned until 1933.
Due to this controversy, Joyce found it difficult to get a publisher to accept the book, before Sylvia Beach from Shakespeare and Company published it in 1922. Nearly a decade would pass before publisher Random House decided to try and fight the ban, and in 1933 it went to trial as United States v. One Book Called Ulysses. On December 6, a verdict was handed down declaring that the book was not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene (Joyce xiv). Augustus Noble Hand ruled for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in affirming the ruling, which allowed the book to be imported into the U.S.
Ulysses consists of eighteen chapters, each covering roughly one hour of the day, beginning around about 8 a.m. on June 16, 1906, and ending sometime after 2 a.m. the following morning. Each of the eighteen chapters of the novel employs its own literary style, and also refers to a specific episode in Homer’s Odyssey and has a specific color, art or science and bodily organ associated with it. This combination of kaleidoscopic writing with a planned structure represents one of the book’s major contributions to the development of 20th century modernist literature.
Not all the great members of the Lost Generation could be found in Paris, one who was not was a young William Faulkner. A Nobel Prize-winning novelist from Mississippi, Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897. Though Faulkner’s works are sometimes considered challenging and obscure, he is regarded as one of America’s most influential fiction writers.
Faulkner was known for using long, indirect sentences with painstakingly chosen diction, this was a stark contrast to the minimalist style of longtime rival, Ernest Hemingway. Today some literariness consider Faulkner to be the only true American Modernist fiction writer of the 1930s, following in the tradition of European writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. His work is known for literary devices like stream of consciousness, multiple narrations with varying points of view, and narrative time shifts (Volpe 21). Faulkner would never go to Paris, he would stay stateside, either in the Deep South or in Hollywood writing.
Faulkner’s most celebrated novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was a productive writer of short stories which include the acclaimed “A Rose for Emily,” “Barn Burning,” “Red Leaves,” and “Dry September.” Faulkner would receive a Pulitzer Prize for A Fable, and win National Book Awards for his Collected Stories (1951) and A Fable (1955).
Faulkner was a legendary alcoholic, something he would indulge in drastically after a major accomplishment and go on lingering binges. Normally during his bouts with drinking he would stay in bed and have various family members bring him his drinks and keep him company. A story of interest describes Faulkner after his most important achievement, the winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, where he drank heavily in anticipation of his departure for Stockholm. His nephew brought him a drink and began to talk about his triumphs in a recent football game, which took place on the same day Faulkner was told he had to sail for the ceremony in Stockholm. Despite his inebriation, Faulkner put two and two together realizing that his family had intentionally lied to him about the true date of his Nobel Prize reception in order to guarantee his being sober at the event. In retaliation Faulkner drank steadily until the actual date. At the time his acceptance speech was not noted for its greatness, until the next day when it appeared in writing, because Mr. Faulkner stood too far from the microphone, mumbled, and spoke with his usual deep Southern drawl, therefore making it nearly impossible for those in attendance to actually hear and much less understand him. Faulkner would donate his Nobel Prize winnings to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers. This eventually resulted in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Towards the end of his life, Faulkner served as a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia from 1957 until his death in 1962 of a heart attack (Volpe 13).
John Steinbeck was yet another one of the famous American writers of the 20th century who stayed in America. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he is best known for his novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), both of which examine the lives of the working class during the Great Depression. Steinbeck wrote in the naturalist style, often about poor working-class people (Bloom 62).
Steinbeck, like Faulkner, never ventured to Paris to join their contemporaries in discussing art and literature. Like Faulkner, Steinbeck stayed stateside and wrote about what he knew and had lived. Steinbeck found his stride in writing about common people in the Great Depression. His socially-conscious novels about the struggles of rural workers achieved major critical success. Of Mice and Men, a tragedy written in the form of a novella about two traveling farm workers, George and Lennie, trying to work up enough money to buy their own farm. It encompasses themes of racism, prejudice against the mentally handicapped, and the struggle for personal independence. The book was critically acclaimed and adapted into a 1939 Hollywood film. Steinbeck followed this wave of success with The Grapes of Wrath based on newspaper articles he had written in San Francisco, and considered by many to be his finest work. The story is set in the Great Depression and describes a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their land due to the dust storms of the Dust Bowl. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1940 and it too was made into a film starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford. Steinbeck’s last great novel would be East of Eden published in 1952. It was here that Steinbeck turned his attention from social injustice to human psychology, in a Salinas Valley saga loosely patterned on the Garden of Eden story (Bloom 162). The story follows two families, the Hamilton’s, based on Steinbeck’s own family, and the Trask’s, an imagined version of the first family, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Seth.
A visit to the official website of the Nobel Prize reveals it was 1962 that Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature, edited by Horst Frenz, “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” The website also has a copy of his acceptance speech available to read, and in which he said: “the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat - for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
There are many more authors than I listed here that contributed to the literary world, not just in the 1920s and they are not just members of the Lost Generation. It is only because this generation has been allowed time to be contemplated over that they have earned the respect that they now have. During their time, they were only considered to be notable authors and not the brilliant or soon to be influential writers that they have become. It is with these authors that should be intensely studied in high school and further in-dept in college. To continue to ignore them is to ignore their accomplishments and eventually forget them altogether. The despair and tragedy they wrote about in modernist and natural tones has set the stage for the decline of civilization. It is also found in the way we perceive our fellow man, with downtrodden eyes. What Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anderson, Eliot, Lawrence, Joyce, Faulkner, and Steinbeck wrote about, their themes, now reflect the world we presently live in. It is in my opinion that if we do not take heed in the lessons learned in their novels, we to will fall prey to a desolate way of life.
Bibliography
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Covici, Pascal, Jr., ed. The Portable Steinbeck. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.
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Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1995.
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Hemingway, Ernest. “Soldier’s Home.” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest
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