Ernest Hemingway et "la génération perdue"

Aux années après la première guerre mondiale, plusieurs américains habitaient à Paris. Certains ont trouve un environnement de loisirs la, et une culture beaucoup plus ouvert aux idées radicales, comme Gertrude Stein. Certains autres ont trouve que cette une idée plus pratique : économique, et bien pur l’intellectualisme que s’agit des nombreux intellectuels à Paris. Il y avait un grand groupe des écrivains, artistes et poètes beats qui sont allées en France. Souvent, les américains trouvent que les sociétés européen, et en particulier on parle de la France, beaucoup plus progressives que nous les américaines. Ils sont connus comme « La Génération Perdue », parce qu’ils avaient souffre beaucoup pendant la guerre.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (21 juillet 1899- 2 juillet 1961 ) est un romancier et nouvelliste américain. Il a passe une partie de sa vie a paris, et deux de son romans s’intéressent par la vie a Paris ; A Moveable Feast et The Sun Also Rises.

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast"

"The reason writers went to France in the '2Os ... was because we could live so much more cheaply there, not because we had any particular desire to leave this country. It's just a matter of economics."

Concernant "la génération perdue":

"

Though several stories conjecture on how the Lost Generation came to be called thus, the most plausible seems to be this: One summer in Belley, while Gertrude Stein's Ford auto was in need of some repair, it was serviced quickly by a young garage mechanic at the hotel where she was staying. When she mentioned the young man's efficiency to the proprietor, her friend M. Pernollet, he replied that boys of his age made good workers, though it was different with the ones who had gone to war. Young men became civilized between the ages of 18 and 25, while the soldiers had missed that civilizing experience. They were, he said, une génération perdue.

When Hemingway heard the story at the rue de Fleurus, he decided to use the sentence "You are all a lost generation" (attributing it to Gertrude Stein) as an epigraph for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, a story about the 'uncivilized', aimless lives of the very people M. Pernollet had in mind. Due to the book's tremendous success, the phrase was guaranteed enduring fame.

Although the description -- in its original sense -- only applied to survivors of the war who had been unable or unwilling to settle back into the routines of peacetime life, other writers eagerly adopted the catch phrase, using it more and more loosely until 'The Lost Generation' came to signify the whole anonymous horde of young Americans abroad, particularly those with literary or artistic inclinations.

Paris was indisputably the capital city of the Lost Generation. It passed, of course, through other towns en route, from Munich to Madrid, Pamplona to Rapallo. Humphrey Bogart's Casablanca can even be counted as a border outpost. But the greatest concentration of expatriates was always to be found in Paris, and more specifically in the streets around the boulevard Montparnasse on the Left Bank that provided the scene for the first part of Hemingway's novel. It was there that the wanderers came closest to finding a home.

The city had a double attraction for writers. Its artistic reputation had never been higher. It was the home of all that was most daringly modern. As Gertrude Stein used to say, Paris was where the twentieth century was. Secondly, it was also a city where Americans could live on very little money. Even young writers with nothing to show for their ambitions but bundles of rejection slips could live like boulevardiers on small allowances from back home. In the exchange bonanza of the 1920s it took real dedication to starve. Writers who had always wanted to live in Paris suddenly made the discovery that it was a practical economic proposition."

--pris du site-web discoverfrance.net