The Literature Book

230

T

he author and literary

hostess Gertrude Stein,

talking with Ernest

Hemingway, spoke of a “lost

generation” of the young—those

who had served in World War I.

Hemingway claimed that Stein

first heard the words from a garage

owner who had serviced her car,

an anecdotal detail that resonates

suggestively with the garage

scenes in The Great Gatsby. “Lost”

in this context means disoriented

or alienated, as opposed to

disappeared. After Hemingway’s

use of it in the epigraph to his novel

The Sun Also Rises, the phrase

“Lost Generation” came to refer

to a group of young American

expatriate writers in the creative

melting pot of Paris in the 1920s,

which included F. Scott Fitzgerald,

John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, and

Hemingway himself. World War I

had left its mark, and they were

restless and cynical, searching

for meaningful experience in love,

writing, drinking, and hedonism.

Fitzgerald, one of the Lost

Generation’s most important

writers, found himself seduced by

the scintillating surfaces of the

“Jazz Age” of the 1920s, while at

the same time being keenly aware

of its defective moral values and the

emptiness of its promise of a better

life for all. His most famous novel,

The Great Gatsby, tells a personal

story of Gatsby’s doomed dream

of love. However, at the same time

it is a story about the doomed

American Dream—its promise of

a better world revealed as a sham.

New money, new values

Fitzgerald saw the Jazz Age as an

era of miracle and excess. A new

postwar prosperity was centered

on Wall Street, where huge fortunes

were made trading stocks and

bonds. The ideal of the self-made

F. Scott Fitzgerald Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born

in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

In 1917 he dropped out of

Princeton University to join the

army. He fell in love with Zelda

Sayre, the daughter of a judge,

marrying her after his first novel,

This Side of Paradise, brought

him success, at the age of 24. He

supported the family (they had

one daughter) by writing stories

for popular magazines. His second

novel, The Beautiful and Damned,

confirmed his reputation as chief

chronicler and critic of the Jazz

Age. In 1924 he moved with Zelda

to the French Riviera to write The

Great Gatsby. The couple later

shuttled between France and

the US. Fitzgerald had a

troubled relationship with

alcohol; after Tender Is the Night

came out in 1934, he struggled

for two years with drinking and

depression. In 1937 he tried his

hand at writing for Hollywood,

and died of a heart attack there

in 1940 at 44.

Other key works

1922 The Beautiful and Damned

1922 Tales of the Jazz Age

1934 Tender Is the Night

THE GREAT GATSBY

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

The Lost Generation

BEFORE

1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short

story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”

looks at the tension between

traditional feminine values and

the liberation of the Jazz Age,

themes the author revives in

The Great Gatsby.

1922 T. S. Eliot’s The Waste

Land prefigures Lost

Generation writing in

its exploration of the

disintegration of culture—

including empty sex and

loss of spiritual meaning.

AFTER

1926 Ernest Hemingway, in

The Sun Also Rises, delves

into the themes of love, death,

and masculinity.

1930–36 John Dos Passos

explores the American

Dream with the stories of 12

characters in his U.S.A. t r i lo g y.

‘Can’t repeat the past?’

he cried incredulously.

‘Why of course you can!’

The Great Gatsby

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