Modernism’s Lost Generation

Modernism’s Lost Generation

The growth of modernism was marked by a strong and deliberate break with tradition; the disruption includes a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views. Authors of the period tended to pursue more untried and more highly individualistic forms of writing. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot are well-known modernist writers and friends; they each approached modernism differently in their individual works.

In Hemingway’s novel, “The Sun Also Rises centers on a group of heavy-drinking, tough-talking and hard-living expatriates and is narrated by an American reporter in Paris” (McQuade). Like Hemingway’s other stories, they are based loosely on his real life occurrences. The characters in, “The Sun Also Rises,” were no longer able to rely on the old-fashioned beliefs that gave life meaning; the people who came out of the war became emotionally and morally lost and roamed pointlessly in the world. They no longer believe in anything, filling their time with trivial and distracting behaviors, such as drinking, dancing, and debauchery. Their pursuits were but futile diversions, leaving the characters sorrowful and unfulfilled senseless lives.

Like Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald experiences in World War I left him with a sense of isolation, loss, and despair. Fitzgerald’s well-known novel, “The Great Gatsby” exhibits the perversion of the American Dream through Jay Gatsby, the protagonist. The 1920s portrayed in the novel, as an era of decayed social and moral values, corroborated in its greed and empty pursuit of pleasure. Gatsby would throw over-the-top parties every Saturday night to quench the massive demand for bootleg liquor among rich and poor alike because of the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the sale of alcohol. His “new money” fortune epitomizes the rise of organized crime and bootlegging in America. Gatsby’s character comes to learn where...