Literary Trends 655of a fair trial in a murder case. They included the poet
Edna St. Vincent Millay, the playwright Maxwell
Anderson, and the novelists Upton Sinclair and John
Dos Passos. After the war the poet Ezra Pound
dropped his talk of an American Renaissance and wrote
instead of a “botched civilization.” The soldiers of the
Great War, he said,
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy...
Source: “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley IV“ (excerpt of 5 lines) by Ezra Pound,
from Personae, copyright ©1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permis-
sion of New Directions Publishing.
The symbol of what some called the “lost genera-
tion,” in his own mind as well as to his contempo-
raries and to later critics, was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Born
to modest wealth in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896,
Fitzgerald attended Princeton and served in the army
during the Great War. He rose to sudden fame in
1920 when he published This Side of Paradise,a
somewhat sophomoric novel that appealed powerfully
to college students and captured the fears and confu-
sions of the lost generation. In The Great Gatsby
(1925), a more mature work, Fitzgerald depicted a
modern millionaire—coarse, unscrupulous, jaded, in
love with another man’s wife. Gatsby’s tragedy lay in
his dedication to a woman who, Fitzgerald made
clear, did not merit his passion. He lived in “the ser-
vice of a vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty,” and in the
end he understood this himself.
The tragedy of The Great Gatsbywas related to
Fitzgerald’s own. Pleasure-loving and extravagant, he
squandered the money earned by This Side of Paradise.
WhenThe Great Gatsbyfailed to sell as well, he turned
to writing potboilers. “I really worked hard as hell last
winter,” he told the critic Edmund Wilson, “but it was
all trash and it nearly broke my heart.” While some of
his later work, particularly Tender Is the Night(1934),
is first-class, he descended into the despair of alco-
holism and ended his days as a Hollywood scriptwriter.
Many young American writers and artists became
expatriates in the 1920s. They flocked to Rome, Berlin,
and especially Paris, where they could live cheaply and
escape what seemed to them the “conspiracy against
the individual” prevalent in their own country. The
quartier latin—the Latin Quarter—along the left bank
of the Seine was a large-scale Greenwich Village in
those days. Writers, artists, and eccentrics of every sort
lived there. Some made meager livings as journalists,
translators, and editors, perhaps turning an extra dollar
from time to time by selling a story or a poem to an
American magazine or a painting to a tourist.
Ernest Hemingway was the most talented of the
expatriates. He had served in the Italian army during
the war and been grievously wounded (in spirit as well
as in body). He settled in Paris in 1922 to write. His
first novel,The Sun Also Rises(1926), portrayed the
café world of the expatriate and the rootless despera-
tion, amorality, and sense of outrage at life’s meaning-
lessness that obsessed so many in those years. InA
Farewell to Arms(1929) he drew on his military expe-
riences to describe the confusion and horror of war.
Hemingway’s books were best-sellers and he
became a legend in his own time, but his style rather
than his ideas explains his towering reputation. Few
novelists have been as capable of suggesting powerful
emotions and action in so few words. Mark Twain
and Stephen Crane were his models; Gertrude Stein,
a writer and revolutionary genius, his teacher. But his
style was his own—direct, simple, taut, sparse:
I went out the door and down the hall to the room
where Catherine was to be after the baby came. I sat
in a chair there and looked at the room. I had the
paper in my coat that I had bought when I went out
for lunch and I read it.... After a while I stopped
reading and turned off the light and watched it get
dark outside. (A Farewell to Arms)
Source: Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc., from A Farewell to Armsby Ernest Hemingway. Copyright
© 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Son’s; copyright renewed 1956 by Ernest
Hemingway. All rights reserved.
This kind of writing, evoking rather than describ-
ing emotion, fascinated readers and inspired hundreds
of imitators; it made a permanent mark on world litera-
ture. What Hemingway had to say was of less universal
interest—he was an unabashed, rather muddled
romantic, an adolescent emotionally. He wrote about
bullfights, hunting and fishing, and violence; while he
did so with masterful penetration, these themes placed
limits on his work that he never transcended. The criticNicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were electrocuted in 1927
for murdering a guard and paymaster during a robbery of a shoe
factory. Although at least Sacco was likely guilty of the crime, the
judge’s prejudice against the men—he called them “those
anarchist bastards”—caused intellectuals worldwide to condemn
American justice.