The lost generation commonlit answer key

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.