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The Lost Generation Poster Boy

© Erica Davis

In 1926 Ernest Hemingway released his first novel, “The Sun Also Rises.” He was not quite thirty, and the book made him an instant success. It also made him the pin-up boy for “The Lost Generation,” a term coined by Gertrude Stein, a personal friend of Hemingway’s, after she overheard a conversation her mechanic was having. He noted how there were no good men left after WWI, and the ones who came back seemed “lost.” Many men went to Paris to live, drink, and simply be, because the cost of living was cheaper. Hemingway himself was living abroad after the war, with his first wife Hadley, and making friends of the people who would later be immortalized in “The Sun Also Rises.”

While on a trip to Pamplona, Hemingway and Hadley, spent time with several friends. One of which was a lovely woman named Lady Duff, whom Lady Brett Ashley would later be based. Another friend, who had dated Lady Duff earlier in the year, Harold Loeb, would become Robert Cohn, the hapless, lovesick character you learn to pity. In truth, Hemingway was jealous of Loeb for actually having had Lady Duff earlier in the summer. In the book, Hemingway’s character, re-named Jake Barnes, would be completely in love with Lady Ashley, although unable to ever satisfy his urge to have her, because of a wound he suffered in the war. At the same time Hemingway was in Pamplona, he met yet another woman, Miss Pauline Pfeiffer, a person who didn’t make it into the book. She would later become the second Mrs. Hemingway, and their love affair would end Ernest’s marriage to Hadley, the very person he dedicated the book to. He always expressed regret over their split, and called himself “a son of a bitch,” for doing it, for the rest of his life. In fact, by 1927 they were divorcing, and he gave all of the American and British royalties of the book to her.

The book itself managed to establish Hemingway, not only as the predominant American novelist of the time, but also as someone who seemed to be an outspoken expatriate. “The Lost Generation,” term was added into the beginning of the book, and was forever linked to Hemingway as a personal stance, which he never really agreed with. The message of his book was not to try and shed light on, nor explain “The Lost Generation,” but in fact, to show that while one generation comes, another one goes. Hence, the passage in the opening from Ecclesiastes, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever...”

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