Commonlit the lost generation assessment answers

Inthis article, Mike Kubic, a former correspondent of ​Newsweek​, discusses the circumstances under which America’s “Lost Generation” came to be. The phrase refers to the citizens who reached maturity after World War I, and whose adolescences were thus defined by a consciousness of mass carnage and destruction. Particularly prominent artists and writers who belonged to the generation included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Sherwood Anderson.​ ​As you read, take notes on the way in which members of the “Lost Generation” are characterized. "Ernest Hemingway" by Lloyd Arnold is in the public domain. [1] Of all the American generations, none bears a label as depressing and unhopeful as the “Lost Generation.” The term, which was first used by one of its best-known members, Ernest Hemingway,​1​ applies to men and women who were born in the last years of the 19th Century and reached maturity after World War I, during a period known as “The Roaring Twenties.”​2 There was a reason for the doomsday moniker.​3​ WWI was an exceptionally tragic episode in the abysmal history of warfare. It was triggered by the assassination in July, 1914 of an Austrian archduke and rapidly and almost mindlessly escalated into a four year-long carnage that cost the lives of more than ten million young Europeans.​4​ It proved nothing beyond the human capacity for committing a boundless blunder,​5​ but it deeply affected a group of American writers and poets, a few of whom — Hemingway included — witnessed the horrifying spectacle first-hand.​6 The senseless slaughter of their European contemporaries distressed and angered these extraordinarily talented artists so profoundly that, in some ways, they lost their way. Though mostly born and raised in America’s heartland,​7​ almost all left the U.S. in their youth to seek fame or at least recognition abroad, usually in Paris or London. Some drifted away completely from their roots, and some even turned against their own country and its democratic system. And yet, these bitterly critical and frequently pessimistic​8​ creative individuals left behind a brilliant heritage that has firmly established America as a literary superpower. Their novels and poems have been translated into dozens of languages, and many have become part of every intellectual’s “must-read” list. Four of the “Lost Generation” authors — Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner — have been honored by the Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest acknowledgment of a literary genius. [5] Considering these accomplishments, the adjective “lost” is a misnomer.​9​Hemingway used it as a fitting epithet​10​ for a group of hedonistic American and British expatriates​11​ who travel from Paris to Pamplona in Spain in his book ​The Sun Also Rises​ to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. But in a way, the book counters Hemingway’s gloomy descriptive and is regarded as one of his best and most enduring works. In fact, one of the reasons for the success of the “Lost Generation” literati​12 was that they were far from “lost” in their message and the artful prose or poetry in which they delivered it. Their harshest judgment was aimed at the undeserved hardships of the poor — Steinbeck’s​ Grapes of Wrath​ is one example — and the excesses and empty lives of the rich — such as the opulent​13​ parties in Fitzgerald's ​The Great Gatsby​ or his ​Tales of the Jazz Age​, and the footloose life and heavy drinking of expatriates in ​A Moveable Feast.​Another striking theme of some of these disenchanted Americans was a rejection of the traditional beliefs and values of their childhood. Henry Miller verbally spat and trampled upon any and all civilized conventions and customs; Hemingway, a converted Roman Catholic, wrote in ​The Movable Feast​ that “All thinking men are atheists” and regarded organized religion as “a menace to human happiness...”; Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound glorified brutal dictatorships. THE FAULTY COMPASS OF THE EXPATRIATES Stein and Pound were extreme examples of the tendency of many of Americans writers abroad to embrace and sometimes support one or both of the two radical ideologies which, after WWI, captivated millions of followers: Communism, which became the official doctrine of the newly created Union of Soviet Socialist Republic,​14​ and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Italian fascism​15​ and Nazism​16​ in Germany. It was in this, the turbulent political arena of post-WWI Europe, where several paragons​17​ of the “Lost Generation” were truly without a compass. The oddest example of this moral blindness was Stein, who was famous as one of the most avant-garde​18​ writers in the English language. A Jew and a friend of Picasso, a Communist sympathizer, Stein endorsed a proposal for a Nobel Peace prize for Adolf Hitler in 1934, and after his Wehrmacht​19 conquered France, she became a translator and propagandist for Marshal Pétain, the head of the pro-Nazi Vichy​20​ government. She publicly praised Pétain for his accomplishments when, after the war, he was sentenced to death for treason. [10] Another fervent​21​ admirer of the far right was Pound, whose Cantos​22​are regarded as immortal poetry. A brilliant wordsmith who was widely admired for the clarity, precision, and economy of his language, Pound was a virulent​23 anti-Semite who blamed the First World War on the Jews and international capitalism. After the war, he admired both Adolf Hitler and the fascist doctrines of Italy’s Benito Mussolini. In 1924, Idaho-born Pound moved to Italy and, after WWII broke out, became the most prominent American traitor by working for the fascist government and delivering hundreds of broadcasts denouncing the U.S. democracy, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, of course, the Jews. Not as lucky as Stein, who escaped all retribution,​24​ Pound was arrested by the U.S. Army in 1945, charged with treason, and eventually spent more than 12 years in an American psychiatric hospital. Upon his release in 1958, he returned to Italy, where he lived until his death.