Lost Generation In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

According to the Oxford Companion to American Literature, Lost Generation is "the name applied to the disillusioned intellectuals and aesthetes of the years following the First World War, who rebelled against former ideals and values, but could replace them only by despair or a cynical hedonism" (Hart, 1995, p.390). Gertrude Stein was the critic who gave them that name which later on will be used by Hemingway as a preface to his novel The Sun Also Rises. Most of these writers, who were members of the Lost Generation in the early twenties, experienced the war in some way or another. In this literary review, then, I will examine three of the most relevant ones: E. E. Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos, along with their approaches towards death, violence and war.
E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) is considered to be one of the most innovative of the twentieth-century poets. He was pretty successful writing poetry, mainly because his poetry was more accessible than others. Extremely intelligent and talented, his adventurous personality brought him to serve as an ambulance driver in WWI, as well as his friend John Dos Passos, and even as Ernest Hemingway did. Thus, it was during one of his turns of duty when he got arrested by the French military, apparently for writing some letters, which included anti-war views. Then, he was …show more content…
They have an affair until the outbreak of the war, and, for that reason, he is forced to leave home. During the years he spends away from home, Gatsby's memory of Daisy's love reaches obsessive proportions. However, Daisy continues with her life and gets married with Tom Buchanan. Gatsby's future is planned on Daisy's choice of leaving her husband and returning with him. Unfortunately, and as Nick Carraway tells us in the novel, Daisy has been corrupted by the society she is living in, and will not change her way of life for any