The Lost Generation
You are all a lost generation – Gertrude Stein
The Lost Generation came of age during World War I. A traumatic but unifying experience, its aftermath saw many young writers — including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and others — voluntarily exiling themselves from the American landscapes of their birth. These expatriates met during the War (Hemingway and Dos Passos both joined volunteer ambulance units), or shortly thereafter in Paris. Here, they came within the orbit of Gertrude Stein, and developed distinct authorial voices, taking up themes of alienation, extravagance, and mortality. Lavish decadence, whether in Paris or New York, was another important backdrop to set against the crisp prose of the young modernists — as exemplified by The Great Gatsby.
The Roaring Twenties also saw the birth of modern book design. Although the use of dust jackets was developed in the previous century, it was not until the second decade of the twentieth century that their design became graphically bold and colorful. Expressing both the themes of the narrative as well as the aesthetics of the distinct historical moment, Francis Cugat’s bold art deco dust jacket design for The Great Gatsby is one of the most iconic in twentieth century American literature. The jacket’s most prominent feature — the staring, melancholic eyes of a woman — influenced Fitzgerald's narrative: after reviewing an early draft of the design, while still in the midst of composition, he told his publisher that he had "written it into" the novel. Cleonike Damianake's evocative, but comparatively restrained, Hellenistic design for The Sun Also Rises is another important example of 1920s dust jacket design. Many designs were, however, anonymous and the artists remain unknown. Dust jackets — which are by their nature discarded, or easily torn or lost — were originally intended to protect a book's binding, and those that have survived are highly valued by collectors.
Inventions in Modernism
Make it new – Ezra Pound
Modernist American poetry was born overseas. T. S. Eliot's radical, evocative The Waste Land — central to the modernist canon — was largely composed and edited (drastically, by Ezra Pound) in England. Both poets, American-born, built their careers and sought to define and promote modernist verse from Europe, and both reached far beyond their native soil for lyric inspiration and theories of poetry. It was in a London café that Pound, along with Hilda Doolittle and Richard Aldington, formed the Imagist movement — which sought to treat the subject of a poem with a new directness and clarity, using “absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation." And it was from a Parisian salon that Gertrude Stein redefined our aural comprehension of language and became a nexus for the modernist intellectual and artistic landscape of the early twentieth century. Her influence was immediately evident in the works of the young expatriates. Her writings affected a broad range of artists, including those that remained stateside, and modernist American poetry was not based solely abroad. Poets such as William Carlos Williams went on to experiment with new techniques as exemplified in his epic Paterson, and exerted lasting influence on second and third generation modernists. The poets of the Harlem Renaissance — who worked in a variety of forms, some highly experimental in the use of vernacular and poetic language — were also pivotal in the development of modern American poetry. But it is important to acknowledge as well that American poetry of this period was not only concerned with formal innovations. Edna St. Vincent Millay commanded the traditional sonnet and ballad; Robert Frost drew upon several traditional verse forms; and Pound made The Cantos his life’s work.
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