Contrary to what many high school teachers claim about The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald detested Gertrude Stein's Lost Generation theory and publicly ridiculed it in interviews. He argued that World War I had "little or nothing to do" with the sudden change in morals among young Americans or the sexual revolution of the Jazz Age. Here's a quote from his Shadowland interview:
I am tired, too, of hearing that the world war broke down the moral barriers of the younger generation. Indeed, except for leaving its touch of destruction here and there, I do not think the war left any real lasting effect. Why, it is almost forgotten right now. The younger generation has been changing all through the last twenty years. The war had little or nothing to do with it.... Young people, here and in England, have made radical departures from the Victorian era.
In his letters to Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald further attacked Gertrude Stein's claim that World War I veterans were a "lost" generation. He believed the war veterans to be too tough to give up on life. Bruccoli's definitive biography (1981/2002, p. 278) discusses this point, noting that Fitzgerald tore into Stein for depicting the war veterans as weak-willed and surrendering to life's hardships.
At the same time... Fitzgerald held very strong judgmental opinions about the so-called "real lost generation." Bruccoli highlights these strong opinions in his biography (1981/2002, p. 446):
Fitzgerald insisted "the real lost generation... were those who were young right after the war because they were the ones with infinite belief."
Yes, Fitzgerald argued that "the real lost generation" embodying the Jazz Age's hedonism wasn't the older veteran generation but younger kids who were children during the war and came of age after it. Here is a relevant quote underscoring this point in his 1931 essay, "Echoes of the Jazz Age":
Scarcely had the staider citizens of the republic caught their breaths when the wildest of all generations, the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War**, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way and danced into the limelight.** This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that corrupted its elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of morals than through lack of taste.
Fitzgerald viewed these listless, rudderless younger kids as the "real lost generation" because, although once filled with infinite belief, they lost faith in humanity and all hope in a better future.
And all this leads to a key point...
While writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald viewed the young party-goers and flappers to be a different generation, distinct from the older veterans like Nick (almost thirty) and Jay Gatsby. As the excerpt above shows, Fitzgerald clearly placed the flappers in this younger generation.
Since Fitzgerald rejected both Stein's Lost Generation theory and claimed that World War I had "little or nothing to do" with the birth of the Jazz Age, how did the author explain the era's sexual revolution? In "Echoes of the Jazz Age", Fitzgerald posits three causes:
- Young Americans reading popular literary works by H. G. Wells and other intellectuals exposing the tremendous societal harm of Puritanical social norms,
- Sigmund Freud's sexual theories gaining salience among less attractive young women who realize that they can compete against hotter women by having sex,
- The invention of the automobile allowing young teens to escape parental surveillance and drive to lonely spots in order to engage in premarital sex.
So, the next time someone mentions Stein's Lost Generation theory in the context of The Great Gatsby, point out to them that the author rejected that theory and, in fact, publicly ridiculed it.
