1. LOST GENERATION Ernest Hemingway
The Lost Generation refers to Americans born from the 1880s to They grew up as young adults during World War I. By the 1920s, many Lost Generation writers had become disillusioned with life.
The first use of the term Lost Generation was by writer Gertrude Stein, who was referring to Ernest Hemingway and a group of American writers and artists. Many of them lived in Paris and other parts of Europe from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. Significant Lost Generation writers included:
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot
Gertrude Stein

2. LOST GENERATION
Ernest Hemingway ( ) was a novelist, short-story writer, and journalist
The main characters of his stories were usually stoics (clear-thinkers, non-emotional, not distracted), and often seen as projections of his own character.
He led a turbulent social life, was married four times, and had many other romantic relationships during his lifetime.
Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
In 1961, at age 61, he committed suicide, as had his father before him.

3. LOST GENERATION Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
“There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”
“Man has no power over death other than to choose the time and manner.”

4. LOST GENERATION
F. Scott Fitzgerald ( ) was an Irish American jazz-age novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.
He finished four novels including the famous The Great Gatsby, and left a fifth unfinished. He also wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age.

5. LOST GENERATION
“See that little stream, we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a whole month to walk to it, a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald ( )

6. LOST GENERATION
Ezra Pound ( ) was an American poet, musician, critic, and economist. He helped to discover, publish and shape the work of contemporaries like Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot.
He often wrote about his outrage at the loss of life during World War I and had lost faith in England and the United States, blaming much of the war on capitalist greed.

7. LOST GENERATION
“All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.”
Ezra Pound ( )

8. LOST GENERATION
Gertrude Stein ( ) was an American writer, poet, playwright and feminist.
She was a pioneer in the development of modern art and literature.
Like many other writers of the time, she spent most of her life in France.

9. LOST GENERATION “[Hemingway] You are all a lost generation…”
“It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.”
Gertrude Stein ( )

10. LOST GENERATION
T.S. Eliot ( ) was an American poet, dramatist, and literary critic who spend most of his adult life in England.
His works, such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men", and Four Quartets, are considered defining achievements of 20th century Modernist poetry.
In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was one of the most influential poets of the 20th century

11. LOST GENERATION “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
T.S. Eliot ( )

12. LOST GENERATION Nazism and Fascism Coming to Fruition in 1920s EUROPE
Philosophical roots of Fascism, NAZISM
Emmanuel Kant (1700s) argued that nothing could be known about God because God is in the one realm & we are in another (‘Lessing’s Ditch’ analogy for God). However, Kant theorized that for morals to be meaningful, God must exist. Without an all-knowing, perfect judge in the afterlife to reward good and punish evil, then good & bad and right & wrong are simply meaningless. You could get away with doing evil or go unrewarded for doing good. Kant didn’t say, “GOD EXISTS”. He said, “for morals to be meaningful, God must exist”
Fredrick Nietzsche (1800s) & the next generation of philosophers took Kant’s words to the extreme. Nietzsche said, “So, what if God doesn’t exist? Then morals AREN’T meaningful. I don’t believe in God or in right & wrong. So I guess nothing matters, life is empty & meaningless.” This philosophy is known as NIHILISM nihil = nothing in Latin Even though Nietzsche said life is meaningless, he said that an ‘UBERMENCH’ (super-race) should be created to give meaning to life (even though life meaningless). This creation of meaning in life is called ‘existentialism’.
Adolf Hitler (1900s) was part of the next generation in Germany. He read Nietzsche’s work and even gave copies of his books to his officers. Hitler believed what Nietzsche said about the meaninglessness of life. He also liked the idea for a super-race of people. To call certain groups superior to others is known as Social Darwinism. Hitler believed the superior race was the Aryan race (i.e. Germans) and that all other races of people were inferior. And since he also believed there was no right or wrong, he found it to be acceptable to try to kill everyone else: 6 million Jews, 3.5 mil. Poles, 800,000 gypsies, 300,000 disabled people, 6 mil. Slavs, 4 mil. Russian POWs & more.
Ideas have consequences!!!
Ideas have consequences!!!
Kant’s Skepticism leads to Nietzsche's Nihilism
Nietzsche's Nihilism leads to Hitler’s genocide & World War II