The twenties were strange and wonderful years in America. “The uncertainties of 1919 were over – there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen – America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.” These are the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940). Fitzgerald’s best books form a kind of spiritual history of the “Lost Generation” (a phrase first used by Gertrude Stein). Many young people in the post-World War I had ‘lost’ their American ideals. At the same time America ‘lost’ many fine young writers – like e.e. cummings and Hemingway – because they had moved to Paris.

Ernest Hemingway was one of the writers who spoke for the lost generation. He drove an ambulance in WWI and then decided to become a writer. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), is a portrait of young adults living in the postwar era. The characters are young Americans living in Paris. Some have fought bravely for their country. But now they are completely useless in peacetime. Others in the novel are simply expatriates, people without a land.

You're an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the

soil. Fake European standards have ruined you.

You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed

by sex. You spend all your time talking. You’re an

expatriate, you see? You hang around cafés.

Without hope or ambition, they try to enjoy each day as it comes. All they want to know is how to live in the emptiness of the world. The typical Hemingway hero must always fight against the Nada (nothingness in Spanish) of the world. He must never give up trying to live life as fully as possible.

(Peter High. Outline of American Literature. Essex, Longman. 1996. p. 146-7. Adaptado)