The Lost Generation

The 1970s was a great decade for British racing drivers, but it was also the era in which the nation lost a generation of brilliant young drivers – Roger Williamson, Tony Brise and Tom Pryce – in tragic accidents. All had the potential to be World Champions. With access to their families, friends and race colleagues, David Tremayne tells their full stories in this superb book, now available in paperback. It makes for poignant but uplifting reading.

Members of the Lost Generation, American writers and artists who lived in Paris during the 1920s, continue to occupy an important place in our literary history. Rebelling against increased commercialism and the ebb of cosmopolitan society in early twentieth-century America, they rejected the culture of what Ernest Hemingway called a place of “broad lawns and narrow minds.” Much of what we know about these iconic literary figures comes from their own published letters and essays, revealing how adroitly they developed their own reputations by controlling the reception of their work. Surprisingly the literary world has paid less attention to their autobiographies. In Writing the Lost Generation, Craig Monk unlocks a series of neglected texts while reinvigorating our reading of more familiar ones. Well-known autobiographies by Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein are joined here by works from a variety of lesser-known—but still important—expatriate American writers, including Sylvia Beach, Alfred Kreymborg, Samuel Putnam, and Harold Stearns. By bringing together the self-reflective works of the Lost Generation and probing the ways the writers portrayed themselves, Monk provides an exciting and comprehensive overview of modernist expatriates from the United States.

"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.

Noel Riley Fitch has written a perfect book, full to the brim with literary history, correct and whole-hearted both in statement and in implication. She makes me feel and remember a good many things that happened before and after my time. I'm glad to have lived long enough to read it. --Glenway Wescott

How he could now be forgotten seems unfathomable. Lewis Galantie¿re guided Hemingway through his first years in Paris, when the author was unknown and desperate for recognition. He helped James Joyce and Sylvia Beach launch Ulysses; started John Houseman in his theatrical career; and saw Antoine de Saint-Exupe¿ry through his wartime exile in America, as his friend and as his collaborator and translator in life and in print. He was a playwright, a literary and cultural critic and an author, Federal Reserve Bank economist throughout the Great Depression, director of the French Branch of the Office of War Information at the onset of World War II, ACLU Director during the McCarthyism-fraught 1950s, Counselor to Radio Free Europe and, at a crucial time in its history, president of PEN America, the writers advocacy organization.Yet, today, few know his name and, to those who do, he is a cipher...And that was precisely his intent. The son of Jewish Latvian immigrants at a time of rampant anti-semitism, Lewis spent his first thirteen years in Chicago's tenements and did not complete grade school. Yet, by his early twenties, Lewis had convinced the world that he was the apostate son of French Catholic parents, and had earned degrees from French and German universities.Galantière, The Lost Generation¿s Forgotten Man, is both a historical chronicle providing rare insights into the lives of leading twentieth century figures (with previously unpublished personal correspondence from Hadley Hemingway and Alfred Knopf), and a meticulously researched biography. Galantière presents, for the first time, the seemingly magical story of the self-fabricated and fully-realized man, Lewis Galantie¿re.

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

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.