Ernest Hemingway’s America was tainted by depression and
despair amidst beautiful pastoral scenes. Hemingway, being someone who was
foremost an admirer of nature, came to slowly despise the West. With the Prohibition
Era looming, the country was quickly becoming morally bankrupt. By writing stories
about the gruesome landscape he was raised in, Hemingway demonstrated how the
beauty of the Western frontier was being corrupted by an America that was
losing its values. This kind of behavior was prominent in the 1920's and 1930's,
as the nation crept from problem to problem – Prohibition, Depression, and
eventually World War I.
Although he wrote romantically about his region, Hemingway ultimately
included the harsher realities about America in his stories. The generation
that lived during this time featured a specific crowd that Ernest Hemingway
found himself a part of after his time fighting in World War I. The “Lost
Generation” was a group of famous authors who came of age during the war. They
became expatriates who moved to Paris to start a new life and go after the dreams
they could not reach in America.
Similarly to the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s time spent in Paris while surrounded
by authors like Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, included drinking
alcohol, café hopping, and traveling. His somewhat decadent life, whilst
consistently writing and publishing work, was tainted by alcoholism and
marriage problems. He used his experience as a man of the 1920’s and 30’s to
create a work that epitomized the generation – he wrote of helplessness and confusion
in the post-war American mind and their depression and disparity that caused
them to play out fantasy lives across the sea.
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