The outline of the period

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The outline of the period

In many respects the period between the end of World War I and the end of World War II was one of sharp discontinuities. Few eras in American history present such vivid contrasts compressed into so short a time.

Politically, the nation experienced what many considered a fundamental change after the election of 1920. For a full decade, the government remained in the hands of the Republican party and--for eight of those years at least--in the hands of two conservative presidents who rejected most of the liberal assumptions of the progressive era. An age of reform seemed to have given way to an era of reaction.

Economically, the nation experienced equally profound shifts. Beginning in 1921 the American economy embarked on a period of growth without precedent in the history of the world. The nations industrial capacity grew rapidly; the income of its citizens soared; Americas position in world trade became one of unrivaled supremacy. And the American corporate world, after having been on the defensive for many years, basked in a widespread public popularity that turned once-despised captains of industry into national heroes. Then, starting with a dramatic stock market crash in 1929, the imposing economic edifice collapsed, and the country entered the worst economic crisis in its history. Industrial production declined; new investment virtually ceased; unemployment reached epic proportions.

Culturally, there seemed to be equally sharp contrasts. In the 1920s a bitter conflict emerged between the forces of modernism associated with the new urban-industrial society and the forces of traditionalism associated with more provincial, often rural communities. On issues such as prohibition, religion, and race, the tensions between the new society and the old were vividly displayed. In the 1930s, by contrast, the nations outlook appeared to shift dramatically. Cultural divisions now seemed less important than economic ones, and the controversies of the 1930s centered less on questions of values than on questions of wealth and power.

Americans in the 1920s experienced a series of profound changes in the way they lived and thought. A new urban culture emerged that helped people in all regions to live their lives and perceive their world in increasingly similar ways; and it exposed them to a new set of values that reflected the prosperity and complexity of the modern economy.

To a generation of artists and intellectuals coming of age in the 1920s, the new society in which they lived was even more disturbing. Many were experiencing a disenchantment with modern America so fundamental that they were often able to view it only with contempt. As a result, they adopted a role sharply different from that of most intellectuals of earlier eras. Rather than involving themselves with their societys popular or political culture and attempting to influence and reform the mass of their countrymen, they isolated themselves and embarked on a restless search for personal fulfillment. Gertrude Stein once referred to the young Americans emerging from World War I as a "Lost Generation." For many writers and intellectuals, at least, it was an apt description.

At the heart of the Lost Generations critique of modern society was a sense of personal alienation, a belief that contemporary America no longer provided the individual with avenues by which he or she could achieve personal fulfillment. Modern life, they argued, was cold, impersonal, materialistic, and thus meaningless. The sensitive individual could find no happiness in the mainstream of American society.

This disillusionment had its roots in many things, but in nothing so deeply as the experience of World War I. To those who had fought in France and experienced the horror and savagery of modern warfare--and even to those who had not fought but who nevertheless had been aware of the appalling costs of the struggle--the aftermath of the conflict was shattering. Nothing, it seemed, had been gained. The war had been a fraud; the suffering and the dying had been in vain. Ernest Hemingway, one of the most celebrated (and most commercially successful) of the new breed of writers, expressed the generations contempt for the war in his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). Its hero, an American officer fighting in Europe, decides that there is no justification for his participation in the conflict and deserts the army with a nurse with whom he has fallen in love. Hemingway made it clear that he was to be admired for doing so.

At least equally dispiriting was the character of the nation these young intellectuals found on their return home at wars end. It was, they believed, a society utterly lacking in vision or idealism, obsessed with materialism, steeped in outmoded, priggish morality. Worst of all, it was one in which the individual had lost the ability to control his or her own fate. It was a sleek, new, industrialized and professionalized world that was organized in a dehumanizing way.

Intellectuals of the 1920s turned their backs on the traditional goals of their parents. They claimed to reject the "success ethic" that they believed dominated American life (even though many of them hoped for--and a few achieved--commercial and critical success on their own terms). F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), established him as a spokesman for his generation, ridiculed the American obsession with material success in The Great Gatsby (1925), The novels hero, Jay Gatsby, spends his life accumulating wealth and social prestige in order to win the woman he loves. The world to which he has aspired, however, turns out to be one of pretension, fraud, and cruelty, and Gatsby is ultimately destroyed by it. Fitzgerald and his intellectual contemporaries claimed to want nothing to do with conventional American society (although Fitzgerald himself seemed at the same time desperately to crave acceptance by it). They chose, instead, to search elsewhere for fulfillment.

Their quest took them in several different directions, often at the same time. Many Lost Generation intellectuals left America to live in France, making Paris for a time a center of American artistic life. Some adopted hedonistic life styles, indulging in conspicuous debauchery: drinking, drugs, casual sex, wild parties, and a generally flamboyant way of life. (The publicity they received helped set the tone for other less alienated members of their generation, who began to imitate this uninhibited pursuit of pleasure.) Many intellectuals resorted to an outspoken self-absorption, openly repudiating any responsibility for anyone but themselves. For most of these young men and women, however, the only real refuge from the travails of modern society was art--not art for any social purpose, but art for its own sake. Only art, they argued, could allow them full individual expression; only the act of creation could offer them fulfillment.

The result of this quest for fulfillment through art was not, for the most part, personal satisfaction for the writers and artists involved. They remained throughout the 1920s a restless, usually unhappy generation, searching in vain for contentment. They did, however, produce a body of work that made the decade one of the great eras of American art. Most notable were the writers: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lewis, as well as others such as Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Eugene ONeill--the first great American playwright and the only one ever to win a Nobel Prize. T. S. Eliot, a native of Boston who spent most of his adult life in England, led a generation of poets in breaking with the romanticism of the nineteenth century. His epic work The Waste Land (1922) brought to poetry much of the harsh tone of despair that was invading other areas of literature.

The writers of the 1920s were notable not only for the effectiveness of their critiques but for their success in pioneering new literary styles and techniques. Some incorporated Freudian psychology into their work, using literature to explore the workings of the psyche as well as the external actions of characters. Others produced innovations in form, structure, and dialogue: Ernest Hemingway, with his spare, clean prose; Sinclair Lewis, with his biting satire; John Dos Passos, with his use of the techniques of journalism as well as of literature. The literature of the 1920s was escapist; but it was also intensely creative, even revolutionary.

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), among many others.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940),

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.

This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a wealthy and attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature and has a series of romances that eventually lead to his disillusionment. In his later novels, Fitzgerald would further develop the books theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking. Many consider Amory Blaine to be at least partially based on Fitzgerald himself, who, like Amory, attended Princeton University before joining the Army. Also, Fitzgerald named the protagonist in his novel "This Side of Paradise" Amory Blaine in reference to Hobey Baker, a member of Princetons class of 1914. Baker was a star athlete in football and hockey who died in a plane crash just weeks after the end of the war in Europe in 1918.

The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgeralds 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 Fitzgeralds 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. 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 20^th 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. Hes 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 thats 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 Daisys 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 Gatsbys love for Daisy, as well as Gatsbys past actions and present intentions, Daisy runs over Myrtle, Toms mistress, while driving back from the city with Gatsby in Gatsbys bright yellow car. Tom misleads Myrtles heartbroken husband George, implying that the accident was Gatsbys fault to punish Tom for marrying Daisy. In a fit of rage, George goes to Gatsbys house with his gun, shoots Gatsby and then commits suicide. Hardly anyone, even Daisy, attends Gatsbys funeral. Carraway, Gatsbys sole friend, attends with Gatsbys 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 Gatsbys extravagant and lavish parties. This also carried over into Fitzgeralds own life. 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 Scribners.

Other fine works include Tender Is the Night (1934), about a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his marriage to an unstable woman, and some stories in the collections Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926). More than any other writer, Fitzgerald captured the glittering, desperate life of the 1920s; This Side of Paradise was heralded as the voice of modern American youth. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The influence of Hemingways 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. Hemingways 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 21^st century, many of Hemingways 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 Hemingways style. In his own time, Hemingway affected writers within his modernist literary circle.