Is it safe to say that the "Lost Generation" was indeed the literary pinnacle of American literature?
Is it safe to say that the "Lost Generation" was indeed the literary pinnacle of American literature?
Is this an essay question?
Possibly. It kind of depends on your preference.
There were some damn fine writers; William Faulkner (I don't know if he qualifies for the "Lost Generation," but he was writing in the 20's), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, et al. They certainly might be the most widely read and well-liked group of American writers.
Faulkner himself might be the very pinnacle of American Literature.
I don't know, hard to argue against the American Renaissance as the pinnacle (Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson). Though for personal preference the early 20th century is my favorite literary period.
@Kelby Lake: If you want to make it into an essay go right ahead, but actually it was meant to be a general inquiry expressed for the sake of creating interesting discourse.
@Desolation: Faulkner is absolutely amazing, As I Lay Dying remains one of my favorite novels. However, I still need to read The Sound and The Fury.
@Jason Cardona: Honestly, the early twentieth century or "The Modernist Era" is my favorite literary period. Any favorite writers?
Amazing how the claiming goes on over what was "lost" to America, hence the name of the generation - a bunch of young intellects who wanted nothing more than to be free of the American puritanism and innocence.
Well the poetry especially is my preference over the past. Eliot, Hughes, Sandburg, Moore, etc. I'm a big Kafka fan.Originally Posted by Hunger Artist
LOL honestly this is really very subjective, but I would say absolutely not. To say that it is would be to completely ignore the Black experience's unique role in America. So no, I would say that while the first real artists in American fiction were Hawthorne, Melville, and their contemporaries, it is impossible to say what the "pinnacle" was without clarifying what we consider truly "American," tho I personally feel Faulkner and Steinbeck captured both the spirit and folly of the American Dream and the isolation of the African American in society the best of any I've read. On the other hand, i am still finishing Ellison's Invisible Man and Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain, so there's many miles to go before I sleep.
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I'd answer yes between Hemingway, Faulkner, Eliot, Pound, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck you've got a tidy little renaissance. But it's important to note that most of those writers lived and wrote for another 40 years after that. The 1920s was just the period of their juvenilia. The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1951, For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940, Absalom, Absalom is published in 1936, The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, Four Quartets is published in 1944, Homage to Sextus Propertius is published in 1934. What we are talking about is a generation of great writers, not a decade of great writing.
Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Walt Whitman make a fine grouping as well. Dickinson came a bit later with Twain so I wouldn't count them in the same generation and movement.
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The lost generation is just a term coined by Gertrude Stein ....
a lot has been read into this, that is not relelvant. While American writers publshed some of their best during the 20s, they did write much later. From the 20s, to name a few, came Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms; Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby; and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street and Babbitt. So the best of their oevre may have been published in the 20s.
Faulkner was a good writer but is generally not classed as a member of the lost generation, and he was not an expatriate. No one has mentioned Sinclair Lewis who published Main street in 1920, but wasn;t an expatriate in his early years. He did win the Nobel prize for literature.
Don't overlook the Harlem Renaissance poets.
Still, the summer in Paris seems to be a deciding factor in all of their careers. Hemingway goes on to immortalize the "space" in his A Moveable Feast, which, as his last work, only solidifies the idea that this was significant in their careers - where they all got their up, if you will.
As for the artistic output though - little good was physically written in Paris, nor were the most significant works written there. What matters is that a bunch of young, Americans got their first taste of the old-world, and specifically, the Continent, which really broke their Americaness - especially after the war.
That's why it is called the Lost Generation, because the spirit of the United States really lost them for this period, and only the intellectual space of Europe, ironically was able to bring about a cultural renaissance of sorts. Look at 1920s Manhattan as a counter-example, not the most intellectual of spaces, but a pretty good reflection of the cultural space that in many ways remanifests itself today.
For music, yes, for poetry - well, do we forget Langston Hughes moved to Paris for a while? And the rest of the poets? Well, he certainly seems the most powerful of the bunch anyway - most of the Harlem renaissance didn't amount itself particularly strongly in poetry, even though the artistic repercussions of the time period later influenced other poets.
The reason the "poetry" of the time is so praised, yet so poorly read, with the exception of Hughes - at least in Canada anyway - is a general feeling I have that the poetry didn't really develop as far as the music did at the time, and it didn't really take off. I would wager the poetry of later Harlem-influenced poets, be they African-American, or not, to be more profound.
The same way the High renaissance in Italy best manifested itself in painting, whereas in England it manifested itself primarily in poetry and drama (perhaps helped by the fact that England got their renaissance after printing).
As for Harlem though, there is a tendency to believe every poet that happened to be there was good, which is simply not true, it just provides a nice niche for historically-driven high school and university textbooks.
Just to clarify, JBI: are you implying that the "Lost Generation" writers and others from the Harlem Renaissance, etc. were not American writers because they moved to Paris?
The nationality of a writer does not simply pertain to where they are when they write, nor does it signify the ideal space that supports their artistic capacities. It is a matter of culture, tradition and lineage. Further, the critique of American society and ideology that is manifest in the works of these writers is totally immanent to the American literary experience.
So, to whom was this generation "lost"? Not American literature. My answer would be: the State, and moreover the canon of "official," State-sponsored art.
I feel that the greatest writers shot themselves in the foot. It works like this: while it may be true that everyone today is not educated, the education available today is quite superior. So what happened is: all the genius ideas of the past became part of my civilization. I really don't enjoy reading the masters. a) I never read them before so I read them. b) all their genius ideas are already in common use all around me so I have heard it all before. I am not saying they were not great. They were awesome. All their work feels spoiled to me, because I got all their work in spoilers long before getting to them. Why read Socrates? I live in a socratic society. I envy you if you are young enough that they come across as fresh and new. I get the feeling like I get to admire how well they put into words ideas we all already knew.
No, I was implying the Lost Generation of authors to be ironically reappropriated. I just think it is a nice slice of irony that this so called movement stems directly from a rejection of Americanism - yet is presented by the original poster as the high point of American literature. It is a nice bit of irony.
As for the Harlem Renaissance, I was just pointing out that the poets that emerged from it, and even the essayists hardly represent the greatest fruition of American literary output, not even the greatest fruition of African American literature, if such literary borders must be mentioned.
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