The Cambridge History of American Literature

Of several descriptions of the culture of the twenties, two, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age and Gertrude Stein's Lost Generation, the one stressing involvement, the other detachment, have proved most durable, and both have paid a price for their durability: they have lost much of their power to spark recognition. Used by Fitzgerald in the title of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age, the term 'Jazz Age' caught the exuberance of the era's wild parties. For Hemingway, who had seen some of the killing and dying, the term 'Lost Generation', used as an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises, carried special authority because it conveyed a sense of how indelibly the Great War had marked the young who survived it. Writers of the twenties, including Cummings and Dos Passos, felt betrayed by the political leaders who presumed to represent them. Sinclair Lewis displayed an almost inexhaustible enthusiasm for recording the surfaces of modern American life.