As I read over these chapters written almost twenty years ago, the story they tell seems to follow the old pattern of alienation and reintegration, or departure and return, that is repeated in scores of European myths and continually re-embodied in life. A generation of American writers went out into the world like the children in Grimm's fairy tales who ran away from a cruel stepmother. They wandered for years in search of treasure and then came back like the grown children to dig for it at home. But the story in life was not so simple and lacked the happy ending of fairy tales. Perhaps there was really a treasure and perhaps it had been buried all the time in their father's garden, but the exiles did not find it there. They found only what others were finding: work to do as best they could and families to support and educate. The adventure had ended and once more they were part of the common life.

For most of them the adventure had been divided into four stages. There was the first stage when young. writers born at the turn of the century were detached from their native backgrounds and were led to think of themselves as exiles in fact, even when living at home. There was the second stage when they went abroad, many of them with the intention of spending the rest of their lives in Europe. The voyage had an unexpected effect on most of them: it taught them to admire their own country, if only for its picturesque qualities. But they still preferred to admire it from a distance, and many of the younger exiles would have agreed with the opinion that Hawthorne expressed to his publisher in 1858, "To confess the truth," he said in a letter from Italy, "I had rather be a sojourner in any other country than return to my own. The United States are fit for many excellent purposes, but they are certainly not fit to live in." Yet Hawthorne went home to Concord in 1860, whether or not it was a fit place for him to live, and the new generation of exiles came straggling back to New York.

They had entered a third stage of the adventure, one in which the physical exile had ended while they were still exiles in spirit. At home they continued to think of themselves as oppressed by the great colorless mass of American society, and they tried to defend their own standards by living apart from society, as if on private islands. They were, however, dependent on American business for their generally modest livelihoods, and they were willing to leave their islands when they were invited to spend week-ends with rich friends. In those days most young writers lived more simply than other college-bred Americans, because they had less money; but they allowed themselves to become involved by slow degrees in the frenzy of the boom years, with the result that they were also involved in the moral and economic collapse that followed. For some of them, like Harry Crosby, that was the end of the story.

There was a fourth stage for others, and it was their real homecoming. Since it took place during the depression it lies beyond the present narrative, which ends with the 1920s, but its nature can be suggested in general terms. During the years when the exiles tried to stand apart from American society they had pictured it as a unified mass that was moving in a fixed direction and could not be turned aside by the efforts of any individual. The picture had to be changed after the Wall Street crash, for then the mass seemed to hesitate like a cloud in a cross wind. Instead of being fixed, its direction proved to be the result of a struggle among social groups with different aims and of social forces working against one another. The exiles learned that the struggle would affect everyone's future, including their own. When they took part in it, on one side or another (but usually on the liberal side); when they tried to strengthen some of the forces and allied themselves with one or another of the groups, they ceased to be exiles. They had acquired friends and enemies and purposes in the midst of society, and thus, wherever they lived in America, they had found a home.

That is the pattern of the adventure as we look back at it after twenty years. I think the pattern is true to history so long as it is stated in general terms, but it is less true when applied to individual writers. Not all the persons mentioned in this narrative saw military service during the First World War and not all of them spent their postwar years in Europe. Kenneth Burke, for example, was rejected by the army doctors and worked in a shipyard. In 1922 he bought an abandoned farm in the New Jersey hills and he lives there today; he has never been east of Maine. William Faulkner came home to Oxford, Mississippi, after serving in the Royal Air Force. He was postmaster at Oxford for about two years, then lost the job and went to New Orleans, where he was hired to pilot a cabin cruiser through the bayous with illegal cargoes of alcohol. In the summer of 1925 he took a walking trip through France and Italy. It was his first visit to Europe and would be the last until he won the Nobel Prize in 1950.

Each life has its own pattern, within the pattern of the age, and every individual is an exception. Katherine Anne Porter worked for a newspaper in Denver before she went to Mexico City, where she lived and worked for most of the decade. At no time did she think of herself as being expatriated. Thomas Wolfe was a shipyard worker, being too young for the army. He spent two of his postwar years at Harvard, studying the drama under George Pierce Baker, and then became an instructor at Washington Square College. After 1925 he traveled widely in Europe, but he differed from the other exiles in preferring Germany to France. Before the Nazis took over he felt more at home in Munich than he did in North Carolina. John Dos Passos was the greatest traveler in a generation of ambulant writers. When he appeared in Paris he was always on his way to Spain or Russia or Istanbul or the Syrian desert. But his chief point of exception was to be a radical in the 1920s, when most of his friends were indifferent to politics, and to become increasingly conservative in the following decade, when many of his friends were becoming radical. Scott Fitzgerald is always described as a representative figure of the 1920s, but the point has to be made that he represented the new generation of ambitious college men rising in the business world much more than he did the writers. He earned more money than other serious writers of his generation, lived far beyond their means ---as well as living beyond his own---and paid a bigger price in remorse and, suffering for his mistakes. Like the others, he followed his own path through life, and yet when all the paths are seen from a distance they seem to be interwoven into a larger pattern of exile (if only in spirit) and return from exile, of alienation and reintegration.(#18)

The last stage of one adventure was, as always, the first stage of another. The new adventure that began with the depression has never been described with the sort of understanding that Fitzgerald showed when writing about the 1920s. He combined intimacy with distance; he seemed to be standing inside and outside the period at the same time; but nobody has displayed the same mixture of qualities when writing about the period that followed. The 1930s are becoming the great unknown era in American history. The public wants to forget them, the politicians distort them and they have not yet been re-created by novelists or historians; yet we cannot form a true picture of the present while trying to abolish the recent past.

The 1930s were the pentecostal years when it seemed that everyone had the gift of tongues and used it to prophesy the millennium. For some reason the economic system had broken down and almost everyone seemed to feel that it could be set in motion again by some entirely simple operation---it was like a motor that had died because the sparkplugs were dirty or because the battery terminals had shaken loose, or perhaps because the carburetor was flooded, in which last case we had only to wait for the gas to drain off and then step on the starter. That was President Hoover's feeling, but others insisted on positive measures, and thousands of mechanics came forward with hundreds of suggested operations---let the currency be changed or the banking system be remodeled, or let the closed factories be reopened by the government, for use not profit, and not only would the engine run again but it would carry us securely into the future.

Then, with the German crisis and the banking crisis in the early months of 1933, the intellectual atmosphere changed again. Thousands were convinced and hundreds of thousands were half-persuaded that no simple operation would save us; there had to be the complete renovation of society that Karl Marx had prophesied in 1848. Unemployment would be ended, war and fascism would vanish from the earth, but only after the revolution. Russia had pointed out the path that the rest of the world must follow into the future.... What came next would be a struggle to possess the future and mold it into a predetermined form; there would be a vast crusade that was inspired by generosity and public spirit, then slowly corrupted by individual pride and thirst for power and for influence over the future, always the future---until the army of the future fell apart into bitterly quarreling groups and lonely individuals, and until the Russians, who had helped to inspire the crusade, proved by their alliance with Hitler that they had no interest whatever in the fate of Western liberals. Some day the story will be told in full, but it should wait for calmer years; as long as the hurt bitterness remains it cannot be a true story.

When it is told we shall find that the members of what used to be called the lost generation played only a secondary part in it. Most of the intellectuals who joined the Communist Party during the 1930s, then left it while blaming others for their mistakes---the "generation on trial," as Alistair Cooke described them in his book on the Hiss case---belonged to a somewhat younger group; they were the brilliant college graduates of the years after 1925. That generation was more affected than its elders by the depression and by the lack of opportunities, after the crash, for success achieved by private initiative. Its members were more inclined to attach themselves to thriving institutions that could promise them a step-by-step rise to positions of affluence or honor---not necessarily the highest positions. In general, security was their idea, rather than glory or independence, and many of them pictured a future in which everyone would be made secure by collective planning and social discipline; that explains the special appeal to them of the Russian experiment. Most of the writers mentioned in this narrative had a different mentality.(#19) They had grown up in the confident age before the war and had started their careers in the 1920s, when it, was easier to earn a living and "even when you were broke," Fitzgerald said, "you didn't worry about money because it was in such profusion around you." During the depression they continued to think of themselves as able to survive without salary checks, and most of them were refractory to social or political discipline. To use a phrase that was popular at the time, they were rebels rather than revolutionists.

They had always rebelled, if only by running away. First it was against the conventionality of their elders and the gentility of American letters; then it was against the high phrases that justified the slaughter of millions in the First World War; then it was against the philistinism and the scramble for money of the Harding years (although that rebellion took the form of flight). Having returned to this country they rebelled once more, against the illogic of the depression, and this time they found a host of allies; yet very few of the literary rebels were willing to march with others in disciplined ranks. Very few of them followed the current fashion by writing socially conscious poems or proletarian novels. They formed a persistent opposition, a minority never in power and never even united in its opinions, except for a short period during the Spanish civil war; that was the one issue on which they agreed. On other fronts their rebellion was not only individual and unpolitical, in the narrow sense of the word, but also essentially conservative. They didn't look forward, really, to a new collective society based on economic planning and the intelligent use of machines; they were skeptical and afraid of bigness; in their hearts they looked toward the past. Their social ideal, as opposed to their literary ideal, was the more self-dependent, less organized America they had known in their boyhoods. Dos Passos was speaking for almost all of them when, in the last days of his uneasy alliance with the Communists, he described himself as "Just an old-fashioned believer in liberty, equality and fraternity."

The exiles fled to Europe and then came back again. A decade was ending and they didn't come back to quite the same country, nor did they come back as the same men and women.

The country had changed in many ways, for better and worse, but the exiles were most impressed by the changed situation of American literature. In 1920 it had been a provincial literature, dependent on English standards even when it tried to defy them. Foreign countries regarded it as a sort of colonial currency that had to be assigned a value in pounds sterling before it could be accepted on the international exchange. By 1930 it had come to be valued for itself and studied like Spanish or German or Russian literature. There were now professors of American literature at the great European universities. American plays, lowbrow and highbrow, were being applauded in the European capitals. American books were being translated into every European language and they were being read with enthusiasm.

The exiles were still too young in 1930 to be responsible for the change; their effect on the international position of American writing would come in later years. So far as the change was produced by literary efforts, it was the work of an older generation. The literary scene had been dominated for ten years by a group of powerful writers that included Dreiser, Anderson, Mencken, Lewis, O'Neill, Willa Cather and Robert Frost. As a group they had fought against the prevailing convention of gentility or niceness and they had won the right to present each his own picture of life, in his own language. They had spoken with force enough to be heard outside their country, and one of them, Sinclair Lewis, would soon be the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. It would, however, be innocent to suppose that this award, with the recognition it implied for Lewis and his colleagues, was purely an honor paid to literary merit. There was also the fact that American literature had come to seem more important because America herself was more important in world affairs. In December 1930, when the Swedish Academy gave Lewis a prize that it hadn't offered to Mark Twain or Henry James, it wasn't really saying that it regarded Lewis as a greater writer; it was chiefly acknowledging that the United States was a more powerful country than it had been in 1910.

The representative quality of Lewis's work was emphasized in a welcoming address by the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. "Yes," he said, "Sinclair Lewis is an American. He writes the new language--American---as one of the representatives of a hundred and twenty million souls. He asks us to consider that this nation is not yet finished or melted down; that it is still in the turbulent years of adolescence. The new great American literature has started with national self-criticism. It is a sign of health."

Lewis answered as a spokesman for his generation of American writers. He attacked the genteel tradition that had prevailed in his younger days; he called the roll of his literary colleagues who might have received the prize, beginning with Dreiser and O'Neill; he complained of the artist's lot in American society and he ended by praising the writers of a younger generation ---"most of them living now in Paris, most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull. I salute them," he continued, "with a joy in being not yet too far removed from their determination to give to the America that has mountains and endless prairies, enormous cities and far lost cabins, billions of money and tons of faith, to an America that is as strange as Russia and as complex as China, a literature worthy of her vastness."

Although the exiles were gratified by his praise of their work and liked his truculent generosity, they didn't agree with his statement of their aims. They had never felt the desire to give America "a literature worthy of her vastness." The phrase sounded too much like an invitation to make vast surveys of American geography and the American past. What the exiles wanted to portray was the lives and hearts of individual Americans. They thought that if they could once learn to do this task superlatively well, their work would suggest the larger picture without their making a pretentious effort to present the whole of it. They wanted their writing to be true---that was a word they used over and over---and they wanted its effect to be measured in depth, not in square miles of surface. Moreover, they had an ideal of perfection gained from their study of foreign writers and they wanted to apply the ideal at home. They didn't want to write family sagas or epics of the Northwest, huge as the Chicago Auditorium and with nothing inside but strangers seated on rows of folding chairs. They wanted to build smaller structures, each completely new but with the native quality of New England meeting houses or Pennsylvania barns, each put together with patient pride, each perfectly adapted to the life it sheltered.

The exiles had changed during their years in Europe and especially they had changed their notions of what American literature should be. They had gone abroad in almost total ignorance of everything written in this country before, 1910---among the American classics they had read Huckleberry Finn and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and perhaps Moby Dick, but that was about all. American literature wasn't. taught in the colleges, except incidentally, and only the current American books were mentioned in literary discussions. The New England tradition had died of anemia. The few nineteenth-century authors who could be admired were French or English or Russian.

That continued to be the accepted opinion during their years in Europe. The exiles studied French authors: Flaubert, Proust and Gide, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. With more immediate interest they studied Joyce, who was in the tradition of Flaubert, and Eliot, who was in the tradition of the French Symbolist poets. They had more to learn from French than from English masters at the time, and moreover the French influence proved to be safer for young American writers because it was in a different language. If they had studied English authors they would have become at best disciples and at worst copyists. Studying French literature, on the other hand, they had the problem of reproducing its best qualities in another language, and it led them to a difficult and fruitful search for equivalents. The language in which they tried to re-create the French qualities was not literary English but colloquial American. That was among the unexpected effects of their exile: it was in Paris that some of them, notably Ernest Hemingway, worked on the problem of transforming Midwestern speech into a medium for serious fiction. Others worked on the problem of giving a legendary quality to Southern or Midwestern backgrounds. The result of all these labors was a new literature so different from its French models that when the American writers of the lost generation became popular reading in France, as they did before and after World War II, the French spoke of them as powerful, a little barbarous and completely original. The French critics had failed to recognize that these foreigners belonged in part to the tradition of Flaubert.

They had also rejoined an American tradition that was older than Flaubert and that was the most interesting effect of their years abroad. Ignorant of their own literature, starting over as it were from the beginning and using foreign models for their apprentice work, the exiles ended by producing a type of writing that was American in another fashion than anyone had expected. Although critics were slow to find parallels in the American past, it finally became evident that some qualities of the new writing had been encountered before. The careful workmanship, the calculation of effects even when the novelist seemed to be writing in a casual style, the interest in fine shades of behavior (including abnormal behavior), the hauntedness and the gift for telling a headlong story full of violent action---all these qualities had appeared many times in American literature, beginning with Charles Brockden Brown, our first serious novelist, and extending in different combinations through the work of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Stephen Crane and many minor writers, so that they seemed to express a constant strain in the American character. Here was a tradition that had been broken for a time, but the new novelists had re-established it, and that was perhaps the most important result of their adventure.

One footnote to the adventure is that they were followed westward across the Atlantic by hundreds of European writers. First came the Germans opposed to Hitler (with a few antifascist Italians), then the Spanish republicans, then the Austrians, then Jewish writers of many nations, then, after the second war began, scores of Frenchmen and Belgians and Central Europeans who had lost their refuge in France. There was a time when New York was what Paris had been in 1920, the place where every writer wanted to be, the capital of the literary world. Then the war ended, the French and the Belgians went home and many of the radical writers were deported, while new refugees from the Iron Curtain countries arrived to take their places---but once more I am running ahead of the story proper. It has a last chapter still to be told.

The 1920s didn't end with the Wall Street crash or the death of Harry Crosby or the last day of December 1929. The moral atmosphere of the boom continued after the boom had ended and the whole year 1930 belongs to the preceding period.

It was a strange year in the end, but it began like any other. During the spring Wall Street recovered from its fright and many stocks climbed above their 1928 levels, although they slumped again in May and June. Unemployment was increasing rapidly, but that was still a matter of argument and statistics, not of direct personal experience for the middle classes. The big newspaper story was prohibition and the lawlessness growing out of it. After that came other issues like the tariff debate that lasted all spring, the naval conference in London that summer, the visit of Ramsay MacDonald to Mr. Hoover's Rapidan camp and the great drought in the upper South, extending from Maryland into Oklahoma. Newspapers were trying to stop the business decline by banishing it to their inside pages, but even in private conversations it was not yet the principal topic.' "After a 3500-mile journey through the Middle West," Bruce Bliven reported in the New Republic, "I feel able to report with some confidence for the benefit of other parts of this gr-r-reat country what that important section is thinking about. It is thinking about Midget, alias Tom Thumb, alias Pewee, alias Tiny, golf."

While midget golf courses flourished in every vacant lot and even in empty showrooms vacated by stock-selling outfits, life for the writers of the country went on as usual. It went on as usual for the returned exiles too, since most of them by now had rejoined the American literary community and were following the same customs. In May and June there was the same exodus from the big cities toward all the countrysides where writers and painters gathered-Woodstock, the Cape, the Vineyard, Bucks County and upper Connecticut. All summer there were the same shipboard parties for rich friends making another trip to Europe-in fact there would be more American tourists in France that year than at any time during the roaring twenties. In the fall there were the same reunions in New York and the same round of drinking and dancing parties and publishers' teas. Liquor was cheaper: in the "cordial shops" to be found all over Manhattan four bottles of gin with a Gordon label sold for five dollars, and grain alcohol, 190 proof, was six or eight dollars a gallon. The punch was stronger at publishers' teas, but otherwise they were a little less sumptuous, and less frequent; books weren't selling well and advances against royalties were harder to get. Nothing else seemed to have changed.

Yet even in the literary world, which was separate from the business and political worlds, there were signs that an age was ending. The 1920s had on the whole been an era of good feeling among writers. Now suddenly they began to quarrel, not merely about personal questions but about the meaning of literature and its relation to life.

In December 1929, a few weeks after the crash, there was suddenly a fierce discussion about Humanism with a capital letter---not the classical humanism of sixteenth-century scholars or the religious humanism of the liberal clergy, but the philosophical and literary doctrines propounded by Professor Irving Babbitt of Harvard and Professor Paul Elmer More of Princeton. The Humanists issued a symposium; the anti-Humanists issued another; magazines and newspapers joined in the conflict, with a good deal of sniping on both sides and the thunder of heavy guns. The battle over Humanism was different in several respects from the guerrilla warfare and banditry of the 1920s. It was on a larger scale, with writers of many groups and two or three literary generations involved on both sides. The issues were confused, as might have been expected, but it was clear enough that they included not only personal and aesthetic but also moral questions, such as the fashion in which writers should live and their relationship to society. There were overtones of politics, rising from the fact that most of the Humanists were conservative while all the radicals were anti-Humanist. There was the suggestion that the 1920s were a definite period in literature and life and that their principal efforts might have been mistaken. Finally there was an unfamiliar note of acerbity in the discussion. Allen Tate had written an essay against Humanism in the fall issue of the Hound and Horn. In the January 1930 issue of the Bookman one of the Humanists answered him, partly with logic and partly with invective. "Not hastily or willingly," he accused Tate of "deliberate misrepresentation," of "puerile inconsequence," of impudence that "could no further go"; and he ended unsmilingly by calling him "a mere talking mole . . . . A fellow so utterly nothing as he knows not what he would be." Such language had seldom been used in the late 1920s, but within two or three years it would seem restrained, in the midst of fiercer epithets.

The New Republic printed a book review that started a violent discussion: "Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ," by Michael Gold. It was an attack on Thornton Wilder for having been a parlor Christian and for having escaped in his books from the contemporary world. "Where are the modern streets of New York, Chicago and New Orleans in these little novels?" Gold asked. "Where are the cotton mills, and the murder of Ella May and her songs? Where are the child slaves of the beet fields? Where are the stockbroker suicides, the labor racketeers or the passion and death of the coal miners?" Although Wilder had offered himself as a spiritual teacher he had done nothing, Gold said, to help the spirit trapped in American capitalism; instead he had become the poet "of a small sophisticated class that has recently arisen in America---our genteel bourgeoisie. . .Taking them patiently by the hand, he leads them into castles, palaces and far-off Greek islands, where they may study the human heart when it is nourished by blue blood. This Emily Post of culture will never reproach them; or remind them of Pittsburgh and the breadlines."

This judgment in terms of social classes and this demand that novels should portray the social struggles of their times, with villainous bosses set against heroic workingmen, would be many times repeated in the critical writing of the next few years. Even in 1930 they were familiar doctrines to the readers of a few radical magazines; but they were strange to the liberal audience of the New Republic. Gold's review was the occasion for scores and then hundreds of letters to the editor, some carefully reasoned, some violent and almost hysterical. At first all the letters defended the novelist and attacked the reviewer. The burden of them was that reviewers should confine themselves to the style and pattern of a book, taking its subject matter for granted. Said one correspondent, "I have been taught, erroneously, no doubt, that the final test of any piece of writing is the manner in which the material is presented, not the material itself." Said another, roused to fury, "It is scurrilous, profane, dirty. . . . I heartily -resent, as do many of my liberal friends, this attack on a man who we consider has done lovely things and who we believe is endowed with a very lovely nature." The effect of letters like these was the opposite of what their writers intended and soon most of the correspondents were half-agreeing with Gold. He had ridiculously overstated his case; he had failed to see that Wilder was a serious writer preoccupied with moral problems and that they were our own problems, even though Wilder's characters were disguised in Peruvian or Greek costumes; yet he had correctly diagnosed the weakness of Wilder's readers while missing the virtues of the author, and he had expressed a mood that was growing as the situation of the country became more desperate. Literature for the next few years would be asked to deal in one way or another with the problems of the day.

There were other signs of change in the literary world, although it would be hard to suggest them by quotations or reduce them to statistics. As I look back on the year 1930 it seems to me that there were never so many shifts in the personal relations of people one knew well or faintly or by reputation. Marriages that had endured all through the 1920s, though both partners had been indifferent to each other and in some cases notoriously unfaithful, now ended in sudden quarrels and separations. Old love affairs ended that had seemed as respectable as marriages. Friendships were broken off. People could no longer endure the little hypocrisies that had kept their relations stable; they had to set everything straight, like a man preparing for death. There seemed to be more drinking than before, in literary and in business circles; at least it was noisier and more public. It appeared to be a different sort of drinking, with more desperation in the mood behind it. People no longer drank to have a good time or as an excuse for doing silly and amusing things that they could talk about afterward; they drank from habit, or to get away from boredom, or because they had a physiological need for alcohol. There was as much horseplay and laughter as before, but it seemed strained and even hysterical. Every crowd or set had its young man who used to be so entertaining after the third cocktail but now you couldn't tell what he would do. "Just when somebody's taken him up and is making a big fuss over him," Fitzgerald wrote about one of the fictional heroes he identified with himself, "he pours the soup down his hostess's back , kisses the serving maid and passes out in the dog kennel. But he's done it too often. He's run through about everybody."

In New York the year was one of nervous breakdowns; the psychiatrists were busy when every other profession except that of social service was losing its clients. One friend who was being psychoanalyzed told me that the doctor's office was crowded with people he knew; it was like a publisher's tea. Many of the letters one received would be dated from sanitariums in Pennsylvania or Massachusetts. It was a year of suicides, not only among stockbrokers but also among wealthy dilettantes. It was a year when faces looked white and nervous; a year of insomnia and sleeping tablets. It was a year when classmates and former friends became involved in speakeasy brawls, divorces, defalcations and even murders; the underworld and the upper world were close to each other. Most of all it was a year when a new mood became perceptible, a. mood of doubt and even defeat. People began to wonder whether it wasn't possible that not only their ideas but their whole lives had been set in the wrong direction.

By autumn the breadlines in more than one American city had spread from back streets into the business section. The Communists were demanding relief for the unemployed and the police were smashing their demonstrations; everywhere one heard stories of bystanders, perfectly nice people, who were kicked or clubbed because they weren't wearing hats and hence were mistaken for radicals. The National Apple Sellers' Association had thought of a new way to get rid of its surplus, by selling it to the unemployed on credit at wholesale prices. When the weather turned colder there were men without overcoats, shivering on every street corner, not only selling apples but also, in effect, crying out to passers-by that they were penniless, willing to work and could find no jobs. The rich merchants had become disturbed; they were organizing charity drives and in a few cases were permitting the homeless to take shelter in their great empty warehouses.

Stocks were falling again, after having risen during the summer. This time their decline was "orderly," but that made the situation no less dangerous for the corporations that had borrowed money against them and the banks that held them as security. Caldwell and Company, of Nashville, went bankrupt on November 14. It was one of the largest investment houses in the South, with dozens of affiliates, and its failure caused the closing of banks in half a dozen states. Soon afterward Bankers Trust, of Philadelphia, closed its doors and those of its twenty-one branches. When the Bank of United States went under, on December 11, it was described by the New York Times as "the largest bank in the United States ever to suspend payments"; it had fifty-nine branches and more than four hundred thousand depositors. People began to fear that tile whole structure of American finance would crash to the ground.

Meanwhile the round of parties continued, and those given to celebrate the New Year's Eve of 1930-31 were the biggest and noisiest of all. There were so many parties that people got invitations to six or eight of them and accepted all the invitations and went instead to parties to which they hadn't been asked. They traveled about the city in caravans of taxicabs, then irrupted into a strange apartment in a mass attack of rainbow silks and uniform white shirt fronts. For an hour, for all age (time is a tyranny to be abolished), every corner of the apartment was filled with screeches and guffaws. When the hostess ran out of glasses, drinks were passed round in paper cups that leaked on the table tops. "The market will turn up in April---first industrials, then rails," a man insisted to the lacquered woman he was holding by both her bare shoulders while he looked deep into her eyes. Somebody was locked in the bathroom and somebody else was hammering at the bathroom door. In the hall bedroom a girl with an innocent and compassionate air was explaining to her lover why she had left him.

"I truly love Harry," she said, "and it doesn't matter if he loves his wife better than me, I'm going to live with him until he sends for her." "Maybe it's my job to make time with his wife," the deserted lover said. Back in the living room the punch bowl was empty except for cigarette stubs floating in a pint of pinkish liquid smelling of raw alcohol. The women had gone into a bedroom and were shrieking as they tried to pull their coats from under a girl who had passed out on the bed. "Does anyone know who brought her?" a sober woman asked. Suddenly the crowd was gone, trumpeting down the stairs, while the host and hostess were left behind to care for the girl and mop spilled drinks from the floor--or perhaps they forgot the stranger in their bedroom and, with the last departing guests, piled into taxicabs that joined the caravan. Curious things happened that night, quarrels of principle and declarations of faith that people heard in the confusion and remembered long afterward. I was most impressed by the story of a friend who told me that after four successive parties he found himself dancing in a subcellar joint in Harlem. The room was smoky and sweaty; all the lights were tinted green or red and, with smoke drifting across them, nothing had its proper shape or color; it was as if he were caught there and condemned to live in somebody s vision of Hell. When he came out on the street, he said, it was bathed in harsh winter sunlight, ugly and clear and somehow reassuring, An ash-colored woman was hunting for scraps in a garbage can.

That was the way a decade came to its end.

It was a better age for writers than I have made it seem---more serious, harder working, more soulful in its dissipations, and above all more fruitful. By choosing for emphasis some of its more picturesque episodes and characters I have given a partly distorted impression. By using books chiefly as texts I have done less I than justice to many of the fine novels and poems that the age produced. It was an easy, quick, adventurous age, good to be young in; and yet on coming out of it one felt a sense of relief, as on coming out of a room too full of talk and people into the sunlight of the winter streets.

Clarksville, Tennessee, April 1933
Sherman, Connecticut, March 1951.

This is a list of writers born in the fifteen years from 1891 to 1905, inclusive, grouped by their years of birth. There are no critical judgments intended either by the inclusions or by the omissions. I started by listing all the American writers in the given age group who were sufficiently prominent in 1942 to have their biographies included in that curious and useful book, Twentieth Century Authors (edited by Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft). Then I added a few additional names, if I could find the years of birth in Who's Who or elsewhere: first, those of writers in the age group who had become prominent after 1942 (I must have missed some of them), and second, those of writers whose names were mentioned in my own narrative. Then, finding that the list had become too long and feeling that it was getting too far from literature proper, I omitted certain categories of authors: Western writers, mystery writers (except Dashiell Hammett, who had an effect on narrative technique; Raymond Chandler had one too, but was born before 1890), popular romancers, one-book authors (unless the book was famous), scholars and scientists (except those like Crane Brinton and Margaret Mead who also write for the public), children's authors and writers on public affairs (except those who are also novelists or critics). Even in its shortened form the list seems to me a pretty impressive record of literary activity.

The list of 236 names includes those of writers in many fields from the frivolous to the solemn and from musical comedy (Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, 2d) to prophecy (Lewis Mumford), philosophy (Kenneth Burke), and theology (Reinhold Niebuhr). But the 107 writers who are primarily novelists outnumber all the other categories, and among them are most of the very familiar names. The emphasis on fiction seems even stronger when we observe that many other writers in the list-most of the poets (36) and a good proportion of the critics (27), the essayists (12), and the biographers (9)--- have each written one or two novels. Fiction was by far the most popular medium in the years when these writers came forward, and many an idea that might have been embodied in an essay, a drama, a long poem, or even a short one, was inflated into a novel. The situation changed in later years. A list of writers born after 1905 would include many more critics proportionately, and I used to hear it argued that criticism was the central medium of the 1950s, just as the drama was central in Elizabethan England.

There are comparatively few women in the list: only 44 by my count as against 187 men. Some of the women are greatly talented, but only one of them---Katherine Anne Porter---has had as much praise or critical attention as half a dozen men of the same age have each received. I think we should find a different situation if we listed the American writers born between 1860 and 1890 or those born after 1905; both groups, but especially the second, would contain a higher proportion of women. The lesson would seem to be that women born at the turn of the century not only had less chance than men to develop their talents---a familiar complaint---but also that they were less challenged by the events described in this book. Not many of them served in the Great War, which was fought without the help of Wacs or Waves. After the war, not so many women as men had the opportunity of living in France as exiles of the arts.

Year of birth has more than its usual importance in the case of American writers born between 1891 and 1905. They grew up at a time when the literary atmosphere of the country was changing rapidly, with the result that each age group was likely to form its own ideals of what a good novel or poem should be. As examples of the difference between age groups, compare the work of Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway, all born between 1896 and 1899, with that of Pearl Buck (1892) or John P. Marquand (1893); or again compare it with the work of younger men like John Steinbeck (1902) or James T. Farrell (1904). The lost generation, so called, was composed of writers most of whom were born between 1894 and 1900, though it also included a few slightly older and slightly younger writers who lived for a time in Europe. The story of exile and return doesn't apply to some gifted authors of the same age who never accepted the European influence and, in a sense, never left home.