The Sun Also Rises | Historical Context

The Sun Also Rises Historical Context

The Lost Generation

Writers, horrified by the stranglehold of business and the uselessness of Prohibition, expatriated to Paris where the favorable exchange rate enabled them to work for a newspaper or magazine. Yet these writers usually spent most of their time sitting in cafes lost in the aftermath of a war for which they refused responsibility. Disillusioned, they discussed their inherited nineteenth-century values and the provincial and emotional barrenness of America. Fortunately, they found comfort in an older generation. Hemingway, armed with letters of introduction by Sherwood Anderson, joined this group who flocked to Gertrude Stein's Salon. Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookstore, the apartment of James Joyce, the transatlantic review offices of Ford Madox Ford, or Samuel Putnam's office. The older writers cultivated the members of what Stein labeled, after overbearing her mechanic, as "the lost generation."

Of the elders Stein, who was the bridge between past and present, and...
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