The Lost Generation

My thesis concentrates on the lost generation, especially its spokesman Hemingway and his relevant works. Hemingway himself can stand for the lost generation as a whole, and some characters in his famous works-The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and his short stories-"Big Two-Hearted River" and "The Snow of Kilimanjaro", and still in his non-fiction Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon, exactly show the spirit of the lost generation. This paper just deals with these works in regard to the lost generation.The whole paper consists of four chapters. Chapter One is divided into three parts, focusing on Hemingway and his literary creation. Part One is about Hemingway's life experience. Hemingway is a Nobel Prize laureate, one of the greatest writers in American literature with worldwide fame. Hemingway was born in 1899 at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb. His father was a doctor and his mother was a gifted singer and dedicated suffragette; both influenced young Hemingway greatly. In 1917 Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year he volunteered to work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front where he was badly wounded but twice decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919 and married in 1921. In 1922 hereported on the Greco-Turkish war, then two years later resigned from journalism to devote himself to writing fiction. Hemingway was a prolific writer. His first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and fn Our Time. The latter included a noted chapter "Big Two-Heated River". In 1925, The Sun Also Rises came out, and then A Farewell to Arms, both of which made him famous and labeled him as a representative of the lost generation. The 1930s was Hemingway's most productive decade. His nonfiction, Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa, and most of his short stories including "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" were published in this period. For Whom the Bell Tolls appeared in 1940. His direct simple style of writing spawned generations of imitators but no equals. Recognition of his position in modern literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. But in his last years, Hemingway suffered a lot from diseases, and he committed suicide in 1961.Part Two discusses World War I and its aftermath. World War I broke out in 1914. In America there were heated feelings caused by the war. At first the U.S. stayed neutral, but in 1917 it declared war on Germany and joined the Allied forces. Soon the war was over. The world after the First World War was quite different. All the old certainties were gone, and everything had been changed. Disillusionment seemed omnipresent; the war caused tremendous destruction and undermined people's spirit. Members of this war-shapedgeneration were deeply affected, and became the i4Lost Generation", which is the very content of part three. The "Lost Generation" was labeled by Gertrude Stein to refer to the writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Lewis and so on, who lived in that disturbing age and were deprived of everything by the war. With old values gone, they were interested in almost nothing. As rootless expatriates, living out of order, they became nostalgic, trying to escape from everything in the society, just as what their heroes do in their works, especially Hemingway's. The Sun Also Rises describes the post-war life of the disillusioned war veterans and expatriates, while A Farewell to Anns catches the mood of a lost generation. These two novels made up a dramatized social history of the lost generation. Some of his other works also stand in this line: "Big Two-Hearted River', "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa. In all these works, Hemingway presents the development of the state of mind of the lost generation from being lost, escape to the last resort-death.Chapter Two dwells on Hemingway's two major works. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, rep...