The Lost Generation

'You are all a lost generation,' Gertrude Stein told the Americans who washed up in Paris after the war, and out of that displacement came a new American sound: plain, declarative, with the real feeling submerged beneath it. Seven books run from Stein's own prose experiments to Fitzgerald's saddest, latest novel, published the same year the scene finally broke up.

1. 1
   Three Lives

   Gertrude Stein · 1909

   Lvl 6288pp

   Stein's early, repetitive, deceptively plain portraits of three servant women lay the sonic groundwork: cadence and repetition doing the work plot usually does.

   ＋Save
2. 2
   The Sun Also Rises

   Ernest Hemingway · 1926

   Lvl 4251pp

   Hemingway's bullfights and bars are all surface: the iceberg theory in its purest form, meaning submerged beneath sentences too plain to seem to be hiding anything.

   ＋Save
3. 3
   The Great Gatsby

   F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925

   Lvl 4180pp

   Fitzgerald's glamour is staged deliberately to mask the damage underneath: a whole lost order elegized in under two hundred pages.

   ＋Save
4. 4
   A Farewell to Arms

   Ernest Hemingway · 1929

   Lvl 4332pp

   Hemingway's wartime romance ends about as unsentimentally as a love story can: the plain style's coldest, most disciplined use of what it refuses to say.

   ＋Save
5. 5
   The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

   Gertrude Stein · 1933

   Lvl 5252pp

   Stein's sly trick: she writes her own memoir in her partner's voice, capturing the whole Paris scene (Picasso, Hemingway, the cafés) from just outside its center.

   ＋Save
6. 6
   Tropic of Cancer

   Henry Miller · 1934

   Lvl 7318pp

   Henry Miller blows past the Lost Generation's discipline entirely: Depression-era Paris rendered with no plot, no shame, and twenty-seven years of American censorship to show for it.

   ＋Save
7. 7
   Tender Is the Night

   F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1934

   Lvl 6317pp

   The capstone, and the movement's last word: Fitzgerald's saddest, latest novel arrived the same year, 1934, the scene it's elegizing had already scattered home.

   ＋Save