The Lost Generation: Modernism in "The Sun Also Rises"

"You are all a lost generation," said noted author Gertrude Stein in a mid-1920s conversation with Ernest Hemingway. The term "lost generation" has since become a moniker for the many bohemian authors, musicians, and other artists born circa 1900, who lived in Paris, France, during the 1920s. The expression "lost generation" also has come to symbolize much of what Hemingway captured in his 1926 classic novel The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway, who was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, was wounded while serving in France during World War I as an ambulance driver (Roberts and Jacob 319). He married Hadley Richardson in 1921, moved to Paris soon after, and became an active member of the cosmopolitan lost generation culture (Hemingway Resource Center; Warren 37). Much of Hemingway's life in Paris was comprised of food, alcohol, pleasure, and writing. Such is the influence that is the backdrop of The Sun Also Rises. A tale that is inclusive of the many ingredients of a modernist novel, The Sun Also Rises explores themes and ideas such as romantic affairs (and a divergence from "traditional relationships," such as marriage), decadence, abiding by self-proclaimed morals and codes of ethics, religious doubt, disillusionment, and existentialism (which includes such travails as anguish and mental indecision). These themes and situations are illustrated when the characters of Jacob Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley take a holiday in France and Spain.