The lost generation

André Kertész, My Friends at Cafe du Dome, 1928

This is a guest post from Philip Greene. He is one of the founders of the Museum of the American Cocktail (New Orleans), and is the author of the newly

A new book of photographs by Burt Glinn – featuring a recently discovered essay by Jack Kerouac – captures the beat generation in all their jazz-heavy, late-night glory

Betty Field, center, and Alan Ladd, right, in the 1949 film version of The Great Gatsby.

Chapter 2: She glanced up at the ancient buildings with disfavor. They seemed so disorganized, like a child’s toy blocks stacked haphazardly one upon the other. Small, crooked windows spoke of a time before glass, when waxed leather was all that kept the elements out. The spalling stone of the buildings themselves felt too old, too watchful. Even the modern gaslit street lamps didn’t help, casting shadows that flittered with the dance of the flame.

The status of affairs in America in the years following the First World War spawned a generation of authors termed “the lost generation.” In response to the political and social atmosphere of the United States these authors sought cultural...

T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound were only a few in a group of writers that Stein pegged at the The Lost Generation. She was considered a mentor and pa…

Ernest Hemingway and the circle of ex-pat friends he later immortalised in 'The Sun Also Rises', Paris, 1920s.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature. The most significant names and texts are known worldwide: T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop (and some would include Ezra Pound). Rita Dove, a recent poet laureate (1993–1995), has decided, in her new anthology of poetry of the past century, to shift the balance, introducing more black poets and giving…

Lost Generation Poem (read the poem line by line from top to bottom, then read again, line by line from the bottom to the top.)