Literary Themes of the Lost Generation and Ernest Hemingway

Themes of the Lost Generation

It was somewhat common that among members of this group to complain that American artists' culture lacked the breadth of European work. Nevertheless, this same period saw an explosion in American literature and art. Common themes in works of literature by members of the Lost Generation include:

• Decadence and the Frivolous Lifestyle of the Wealthy

  Consider the lavish parties of James Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or those thrown by the characters in his Tales of the Jazz Age. Recall the aimless drinking and parties of the circles of expatriates in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. With ideals of the war lost for many, hedonism was the result. The Lost Generation writers revealed the hollow nature of the shallow, frivolous lives of the young and independently wealthy in the aftermath of the war.

• The Death of the American Dream

  Many Lost Generation writers exhibited this theme in their novels. It is most prominent in The Great Gatsby as the character Nick comes to realize the corruption that surrounds him.

• Idealized Past

  Rather than face the horrors of warfare, many worked to create an idealized but unattainable image of the past with no bearing on reality, as for example in The Great Gatsby, Daisy's inability to see Gatsby as he truly is, and the closing lines to the novel after all its death and disappointment.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway and the Lost Generation

WW1 changed the way that the world viewed itself; no longer could Americans and Europeans claim to be innocent and simply happy because of the war. Hemingway seemed to pick up on the attitudes and troubles of these men and translated them successfully into fiction. In a historic sense, Hemingway expressed the feelings of his generation.

Hemingway and the Modernist Literary Movement

Hemingway was also one of the leaders of the modernist literary movement after WW1. Modernist writers like Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Virginia Woolf often experimented with language. Hemingway did so by trimming the often excessive language of the 19th century into a spare, hard-edged prose. They also are brutally honest about their subjects; Hemingway never sugarcoated his material, cutting instead to the quick of his subject. This period is often argued to have a distinctly masculine bent. Hemingway received the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In Our Time (Short Story Collection by Hemingway)

It's Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published in 1925. Its title is derived from the English Book of Common Prayer: "Give peace in our time, O Lord." The main themes are alienation, loss, grief, and separation, and include descriptions of acts of war, bullfighting, and current events. The collection is known for its spare language and oblique depiction of emotion, through a style known as Hemingway's "theory of omission."

Iceberg Theory: Hemingway's Writing Style

The Iceberg Theory is a style of writing coined by Ernest Hemingway. It's a minimalistic style where the writer focuses on surface elements without explicitly discussing underlying themes. Hemingway believed the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface but should shine through implicitly. Essentially, he gives you the facts—those facts are the tip of the iceberg floating above water. Everything else—the supporting structure—floats beneath the water, out of sight from the reader.

From almost the beginning of his writing career, Hemingway's distinctive style occasioned a great deal of controversy. His style is simple, direct, and unadorned as a result of his newspaper training. He avoids adjectives, but because he is a master at transmitting emotion without the flowery prose of his Victorian novelist predecessors, among other parts of speech, they come closest to things. Biographer Carlos Baker said that since Hemingway began his career writing short stories, he learned how to "get the most from the least, how to prune language, to multiply intensities, to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth." Critics have not entirely agreed on Hemingway's style. Shortly before his death, Hemingway gave to the "Wisdom Foundation in California" a collection of his observations on life and art, love and death.