American literature of the 1920s

Like other writers of the 1920's, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were fascinated by what had become the American Dream.  The impact of World War I on both Fitzgerald and Hemingway's generation was tremendous.  Indeed, many writers in teh post war period took on the unpleasant task of exposing the degradation of the American Dream, of covering the grossest aspects of selfishness, hypocrisy, and moral vacuum.  Fitzgerald and Hemingway's characters are of a carless, aimless, pleasure seeking crowd.  Before Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, opens, he quotes Gertrude Stein who names the geneartion that came of age during the first World War as the "lost generation."  Indeed, the pre war values of love, faith, manhood, and womanhood fail to offer an adequate answer to Fitzgerald and Hemingway's characters who try to produce meaning in a world seemingly lost to rampant, a moral consumerism, and loveless-ness.  Both authors closely examine American realities through characters that wander through endless experiences of wealth, drunkednness, and sex, with the hope that they will provide at least the possibility of some sort of dependable meaning.