After The Lost Generation

"During the Depression years, J. Arthur Rath spent his early childhood shuttled between relatives and foster parents in Hawai'i and on the mainland while his single mother, Hualani, struggled to make a living. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, his grandparents sent him to the Big Island and Konawaena School, where he heard the Kamehameha Schools boy choir at a school assembly. The performance made a deep impression on Rath, and a year later, in 1944, he entered Kamehameha as an eighth-grade boarder. Thus began Rath's love affair with an institution that he credits with turning his life around, with giving him and other disadvantaged children of native ancestry - Hawai'i's "lost generations" - the confidence and support necessary to make something of themselves. This is the story of that love affair. It is also the story of Rath's recent battle, together with other alumni, for the integrity of his beloved Kamehameha against the school's trustees and their organization, the powerful Bishop Estate." "Intelligent and impressionable, Rath spent an idyllic four years at Kamehameha. In a lively talk-story manner, he reminisces about campus life and his classmates, many of whom became lifelong friends and influential members of the Hawaiian community: Don Ho, Nona Beamer, Oswald Stender, Tom Hugo, William Fernandez. Years later Rath, a successful retired businessman, would call on these same friends to hold Kamehameha's trustees accountable for their mismanagement of Bishop Estate's vast financial holdings and ultimately their failure to carry out founder Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop's mandate to educate Hawaiian children. Rath draws on his many personal ties to the school and the estate to provide surprising revelations on the trustees and the "Bishop Estate Scandal," which made headlines daily throughout the mid-1990s."--BOOK JACKET.

Nothing in the papers, not the most vivid and heart-rending descriptions, have made me realise war like your letters' Vera Brittain to Roland Leighton, 17 April 1915. This selection of letters, written between 1913 & 1918, between Vera Brittain and four young men - her fiance Roland Leighton, her brother Edward and their close friends Victor Richardson & Geoffrey Thurlow present a remarkable and profoundly moving portrait of five young people caught up in the cataclysm of total war. Roland, 'Monseigneur', is the 'leader' & his letters most clearly trace the path leading from idealism to disillusionment. Edward, ' Immaculate of the Trenches', was orderly & controlled, down even to his attire. Geoffrey, the 'non-militarist at heart' had not rushed to enlist but put aside his objections to the war for patriotism's sake. Victor on the other hand, possessed a very sweet character and was known as 'Father Confessor'. An important historical testimony telling a powerful story of idealism, disillusionment and personal tragedy.

"Excellent. This is a fine, and unusual, collection of literary Americana."--Atlantic "Fine comic moments of truth."--New York Times Book Review "An invaluable source of literary history."--Publishers Weekly This is the story of one of the most famous literary "sets" of the twentieth century. Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the center of a group including Ernest Hemingway and his wives, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Phillip Barry, and many others. They personified the jazz age and the lost generation. The Murphys have been viewed primarily as cult/pop figures. In this book Miller shows, through a sequential interweaving of letters from several correspondents, that they actually were the nucleus without which the group as we know it would not have stayed together. Miller allows the individual correspondents to tell their own stories, providing new insights into their lives and this era. It is the best sort of eavesdropping. Gerald and Sara Murphy married on December 30, 1915. Both families were moneyed and cosmopolitan. Their attraction to each other was in part based on their desire to escape the routine and predictable social rounds in which their families were immersed. Against their families' wishes, they and their three children left for Europe in 1921. They remained in France for over a decade, and quite naturally socialized with the expatriate set. They were, in part, models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. MacLeish wrote poems about them, their friends paid tribute to them and relied on them day to day and in correspondence, and their own letters are worth reading for their liveliness and because they so well preserve a record of the twenties and thirties. Miller provides nearly every extant letter between the Murphys and their friends during those decades. Most of them have not been published previously, and of course, they have never been presented collectively. Together, they constitute an epistolary "novel" of peculiar power and authenticity about a remarkable era. Linda Patterson Miller is associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at Ogontz.

John W. Aldridge is one of the few young critics of importance to appear on the literary scene since World War II. In AFTER THE LOST GENERATION he discusses with acumen and discernment the most important works of the young post-war writers of the Forties—Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, John Horne Burns, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Paul Bowles, Alfred Hayes and others. Aldridge discusses three writers of the 1920’s—Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—to introduce the writers of World War II. He draws significant parallels between the work of the two generations—between Hemingway and Hayes, between Fitzgerald and Burns, between Bowles and Hemingway, and between the “lost generation” of the Twenties and the “illusionless lads of the Forties.” More important than the likenesses between the two generations are the new developments. Norman Mailer and Irwin Shaw wrote enormous “encyclopedic” war novels which covered whole armies and had settings in a dozen different lands. John Horne Burns sought relief from the chaos of modernity in Italian culture and Old World tradition. Truman Capote dealt essentially with abnormalities and peculiarities in human nature. Anti-Semitism, the Negro problem, and homosexuality appear time and again in the new writing. The old themes with which Hemingway and Fitzgerald shattered Victorian patterns—sex, drinking, the brutalities of war—are no longer shocking. AFTER THE LOST GENERATION is a penetrating analysis of post-war fiction that already has provoked wide controversy and discussion. “A pioneer study...The first serious and challenging book about the new novelists.”—Malcolm Cowley, New York Herald Tribune