Unit 5: American Literature

The Lost Generation

The Fitzgerald's Family

In the aftermath of World War I many novelists produced a literature of disillusionment. Some lived abroad and were known as "the Lost Generation." F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels captured the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's great theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, was of youth's golden dreams turning to disappointment. His prose was exquisite, yet his vision was essentially melancholy and nostalgic.

Young Hemingway

War had also affected Ernest Hemingway Having seen violence and death close at hand, Hemingway adopted a moral code exalting simple survival and the basic values of strength, courage and honesty. In his own writing, he cut out all unnecessary words and complex sentence structure, concentrating on concrete objects and actions. His main characters were usually tough, silent men, good at sports or war but awkward in their dealings with women. Among his best books were The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He eventually won the Nobel Prize and is considered one of the greatest American writers.

William Faulkner

A Southerner, William Faulkner, found in one small imaginary corner of the state of Mississippi, deep in the heart of the South, enough material for a lifetime of writing. His social portraits were realistic, yet his prose style was experimental. To show the relationship of the past and the present, he sometimes jumbled the time sequence of his plots; to reveal a character's primitive impulses and social prejudices, he recorded and edited the rambling of his or her consciousness. Some of his best novels are The Sound and the Fury (1929) , Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner, too, was a Nobel Prize winner.

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