Paris’s Appeal to the Lost Generation

The Lost Generation refers specifically to the group of American expatriate writers associated with 1920s Paris. It is a term used to refer to the generation that came of age during World War I. Ernest Hemingway is said to be the most distinguished author of this group of writers having first used the phrase "You are all a lost generation" as the epigraph to his first novel The Sun Also Rises. After World War I, when nineteen-year-old Hemingway returned home, his parents did not understand the psychological trauma he had suffered during the war, and they pestered him to continue a normal life by finding a job or going to college. After he married his first wife, he moved to Paris where he joined the group of American expatriates that would be known as the Lost Generation. His books A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises depict the life and the views he had during his stay in Paris. These texts show the sense of disillusionment with the narrow culture the Lost Generation perceived in America after the Great War.
These texts depict Paris as a place where people can find hope and meaning even after the Great War. It was also a place where young Americans could have a relatively cheap lifestyle while living in high style. The City of Lights had long been famous for its philosophical intrigues and artistic inspiration and it somehow continued to cling to this reputation even after the war. The members of the Lost Generation came to learn new traditions in Paris. As this quote demonstrates, “I wonder where Cohn got the incapacity to enjoy Paris” (Hemingway 49), every aspect of Paris was enjoyable even when the moral decadence was perceived and experienced by all. In this example the character Cohn of The Sun Also Rises was not an American expatriate and he didn’t fight in World War 1. That is why he doesn’t understand the traumas the characters go through and how having meaningless sex and drinking heavily can occur around him without any moral effect to the rest of