THREE GENERATIONS
Wallace Phelps
THE so-CALLED LOST GENERATION,
so effectively described by Mal–
colm Cowley in
Exile's Return,•
has been the most ·sensational of literary
generations in the United States. It arose at a time of unprecedented
expansion, when artists could satisfy their desire to flaunt society and
yet reap the material benefits which a prosperous middle class could
offer. The post-war fever and disillusion fed its talent for gestures and
"esthetic" flights. But in the end this very disillusion, and, to be sure, the
deepening of class grooves, shattered the chic of the lost generation,
and,
by forcing a questioning of assumptions, split most of its members
into "lefts" and "rights" (though some, of course, like Gertrude Stein,
had gained enough momentum to be little affected by changes in social
forces or in critical assumptions).
Literary generations in America have never been so homogeneous
nor so clearly defined as they have been in Europe, where the "school"
was
always the thing. Probably this is due to the fact that our traditions
in
general, and particularly our cultural traditions, have changed too
rapidly and have sprawled too widely to have achieved any considerable
unity and continuity. The group of writers, which included Dreiser,
Anderson, Lewis, Robinson and Sandburg, was the nearest approximation
of a literary generation immediately preceding the writers who found
that they were lost. And the differences between them are too patent to
require emphasis. What seems to characterize this earlier group is a firm
setting in American soil, and a social interest. Some were regional,
others national; but most of them were trying to catch the spin of social
life. And in many of them could be found the symptoms of capitalist
contradiction and disintegration. They were generally free of sophistica–
tion and verve, almost to the point of provincialism. It was a period of
muckrak.ing, of iconoclasm and satire, and extreme literalism ot method.
The "autonomous," speculative capacities of the mind had not been dis-
• W.
W.
Norton
&
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