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Aldridge discusses three writers of the 1920’s—Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—to introduce the writers of World War II. He draws significant parallels between the work of the two generations—between Hemingway and Hayes, between Fitzgerald and Burns, between Bowles and Hemingway, and between the “lost generation” of the Twenties and the “illusionless lads of the Forties.” More important than the likenesses between the two generations are the new developments. Norman Mailer and Irwin Shaw wrote enormous “encyclopedic” war novels which covered whole armies and had settings in a dozen different lands. John Horne Burns sought relief from the chaos of modernity in Italian culture and Old World tradition. Truman Capote dealt essentially with abnormalities and peculiarities in human nature. Anti-Semitism, the Negro problem, and homosexuality appear time and again in the new writing. The old themes with which Hemingway and Fitzgerald shattered Victorian patterns—sex, drinking, the brutalities of war—are no longer shocking.
AFTER THE LOST GENERATION is a penetrating analysis of post-war fiction that already has provoked wide controversy and discussion.
“A pioneer study...The first serious and challenging book about the new novelists.”—Malcolm Cowley, New York Herald Tribune
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John W. Aldridge (September 26, 1922 - February 7, 2007) was an American writer, literary critic, teacher and scholar. During his career, he was a professor of English at a number of universities, director of the Hopwood Program, USIA Special Ambassador to Germany, and an esteemed literary critic. Born in Sioux City, Iowa in 1922, he was educated at the University of Chattanooga in Tennessee and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1942 he was a Fellow of The Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont. From 1948 to 1955, Aldridge taught at the University of Vermont, later transferring to Sarah Lawrence College and Queens College, both in New York. He lectured in the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton in 1953-1954 and was Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at New York University, before becoming a professor of English at the University of Michigan. John W. Aldridge’s was the author of a number of books, including: Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920-1951; Representing the Achievement of Modern American and British Critics (1952); In Search of Heresy (1956); Party at Cranton (1960); Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis (1966); In the Country of the Young (1970); Devil in the Fire; Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture 1951-1971 (1972); American Novel and the Way We Live Now (1983); Classics & Contemporaries (1992); and Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-line Fiction (1992). He passed away in Madison, Georgia in 2007 at the age of 84.
