Last Night | The Failure of Walter and Marit Such
Dyer holds a Ph.D. in English literature and has published extensively on fiction, poetry, film, and television. He is also a freelance university teacher, writer, and educational consultant. In the following essay, he explores the failure of Walter and Marit Such to engage in a meaningful way the attitudes and philosophies of a Lost Generation that they so clearly resemble.
When Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) drew upon one of poet Gertrude Stein’s (1874–1946) apocryphal sayings as the basis for his now-famous epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), it is doubtful that he was aware that the statement “You are all a lost generation” would come to define a whole generation and would continue to resonate with near-mythic power in American culture for decades to come. Referring to the generation that came of age in the United States during and following World War I, Hemingway’s Lost Generation was a population of artists and...
[The entire page is 1763 words long]
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