This book is the story to 1930 of what used to be called the lost generation of American writers. It was Gertrude Stein who first applied the phrase to them. "You are all a lost generation," she said to Ernest Hemingway, and Hemingway used the remark as an inscription for his first novel. It was a good novel and became a craze---young men tried to get as imperturbably drunk as the hero, young women of good families took a succession of lovers in the same heartbroken fashion as the heroine, they all talked like Hemingway characters and the name was fixed. I don't think there was any self-pity in it. Scott Fitzgerald sometimes pitied himself, and with reason. Hart Crane used to say that he was "caught like a rat in a trap"; but neither Crane nor Fitzgerald talked about being part of a lost generation. Most of those who used the phrase about themselves were a little younger and knew they were boasting. They were like Kipling's gentlemen rankers out on a spree and they wanted to have it understood that they truly belonged "To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned." Later they learned to speak the phrase apologetically, as if in quotation marks, and still later it was applied to other age groups, each of which was described in turn as being the real lost generation; none genuine without the trademark. In the beginning, however, when the phrase was applied to young writers born in the years around 1900, it was as useful as any half-accurate tag could be.

It was useful to older persons because they had been looking for words to express their uneasy feeling that postwar youth ---"flaming youth"---had an outlook on life that was different from their own. Now they didn't have to be uneasy; they could read about the latest affront to social standards or to literary conventions and merely say, "That's the lost generation." But the phrase was also useful to the youngsters. They had grown up and gone to college during a period of rapid change when time in itself seemed more important than the influence of class or locality. Now at last they had a slogan that proclaimed their feeling of separation from older writers and of kinship with one another. In the slogan the noun was more important than the adjective. They might or might not be lost, the future would decide that point; but they had already had the common adventures and formed the common attitude that made it possible to describe them as a generation.

In that. respect, as in the attitude itself, they were different from the writers who preceded them. Sectional and local influences were relatively more important during the years before 1900. Two New England writers born fifteen or twenty years apart---Emerson and Thoreau, for example---might bear more resemblance to each other than either bore to a Virginian or a New Yorker of his own age; compare Emerson and Poe, or Thoreau and Whitman. Literature was not yet centered in New York; indeed, it had no center on this side of the ocean. There was a Knickerbocker School, there was a Concord School, there was a Charleston School; later there would be a Hoosier School, a Chicago School. Men of every age belonged to the first three and might have belonged to the others, had these not been founded at a time when writers were drifting to the metropolis.

Publishing, like finance and the theater, was becoming centralized after 1900. Regional traditions were dying out; all regions were being transformed into a great unified market for motorcars and Ivory soap and ready-to-wear clothes. The process continued during the childhood of the new generation of writers. Whether they grew up in New England, the Midwest, the Southwest or on the Pacific Coast, their environment was almost the same; it was a little different in the Old South, which had kept some of its local manners but was losing them. The childhood of these writers was less affected by geography than it was by the financial situation of their parents, yet even that was fairly uniform. A few of the writers came from wealthy families, a very few from the slums. Most of them were the children of doctors, small lawyers, prosperous farmers or struggling businessmen---of families whose incomes in those days of cheaper living were between two thousand and perhaps eight thousand dollars a year. Since their playmates were also middle-class they had the illusion of belonging to a great classless society.

All but a handful were pupils in the public schools, where they studied the same textbooks, sang the same songs and revolted rather tamely against the same restrictions. At the colleges they attended, usually some distance from their homes., they were divested of their local peculiarities, taught to speak a standardized American English and introduced to the world of international learning. Soon they would be leaving for the army in France, where they would be subjected together to a sudden diversity of emotions: boredom, fear, excitement, pride, aloofness and curiosity. During the drab peacemaking at Versailles they would suffer from the same collapse of emotions. They would go back into civilian life almost as if they were soldiers on a long furlough.

Some of them would go to Greenwich Village to begin the long adventure of the 1920s Only long afterward could the period be described, in Scott Fitzgerald's phrase, as "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." At first it promised to be something quite different, a period of social and moral reaction. The Prohibition Amendment had gone into effect in January 1920, strikes were being broken all over the country, and meanwhile Greenwich Village was full of plain-clothes dicks from the Vice Squad and the Bomb Squad. I remember that many young women were arrested and charged with prostitution because the dicks had seen them smoking cigarettes in the street, and I remember that innocent tea-rooms were raided because they were thought to harbor dangerous Reds. Then Harding was elected, the Red scare was forgotten and, after a sharp recession in 1921, the country started out to make money; it was the new era of installment buying and universal salesmanship. The young writers couldn't buy luxuries even on the installment plan. They didn't want to advertise or sell them or write stories in which salesmen were the romantic heroes. Feeling like aliens in the commercial world, they sailed for Europe as soon as they had money enough to pay for their steamer tickets.

Nor would this be the end of their adventures in common. Until they were thirty most of them would follow a geographical pattern of life, one that could be suggested briefly by the names of two cities and a state: New York, Paris, Connecticut. After leaving Greenwich Village they would live in Montparnasse (or its suburbs in Normandy and on the Riviera), and some of them would stay there year after year in what promised to be a permanent exile. Others would go back to New York, then settle in a Connecticut farmhouse with their books, a portable typewriter and the best intentions. Whether they were at home or abroad in 1929, most of them would have found a place in the literary world and would be earning a fairly steady income. The depression would be another common experience, almost as shattering as the war.

I am speaking of the young men and women who graduated from college, or might have graduated, between 1915, say, and 1922. They were never united into a single group or school. Instead they included several loosely defined and vaguely hostile groups, in addition to many individuals who differed with every group among their contemporaries; the fact is that all of them differed constantly with all the others. They all felt, however, a sharper sense of difference in regard to writers older than themselves who hadn't shared their adventures. It was as if the others had never undergone the same initiatory rites and had never been admitted to the same broad confraternity. In a strict sense the new writers formed what is known as a literary generation.

Their sense of being different has been expressed time and again in the books they wrote. Take, for example, the second paragraph of a story by Scott Fitzgerald, "The Scandal Detectives," in which he is describing an episode from his boyhood:

Some generations are close to those that succeed them; between others the gulf is infinite and unbridgeable. Mrs. Buckner---a woman of character, a member of Society in a large Middle Western city---carrying a pitcher of fruit lemonade through her own spacious back yard, was progressing across a hundred years. Her own thoughts would have been comprehensible to her great-grandmother; what was happening in a room above the stable would have been entirely unintelligible to them both. In what had once served as the coachman's sleeping apartment, her son and a friend were not behaving in a normal manner, but were, so to speak, experimenting in a void. They were making the first tentative combinations of the ideas and materials they found ready at their hands---ideas destined to become, in future years, first articulate, then startling and finally commonplace. At the moment she called up to them they were sitting with disarming quiet upon the still unhatched eggs of the mid-twentieth century.

Boys like Ripley Buckner and his friend---who was Scott Fitzgerald under another name---were born shortly before 1900. Since they were in their teens when the twentieth century was also in its teens, it is no wonder that they fell into the habit of identifying themselves with the century. They retained the habit until they---and the century---were well along in the thirties; As representatives of a new age they had a sense of being somehow unique; one catches an echo of it in the affectionate fashion in which Fitzgerald often used the phrase "my contemporaries."

It seems to me now that the feeling was insufficiently grounded in fact and that Mrs. Buckner, for example, was closer to her son and his friend than the youngsters realized. Edith Wharton was of Mrs. Buckner's age and she could understand Fitzgerald perhaps better than he understood Mrs. Wharton. Going farther back, many young writers of the 1890s had also been in revolt and had tried to introduce European standards of art and conduct into American literature; they too were a lost generation (and more tragically lost than their successors). The postwar writers, in their feeling that their experiences were unique, revealed their ignorance of the American past. On the other hand, the feeling was real in itself, however ill grounded, and it made them regard all other members of their own age group, whether artists or athletes or businessmen, as belonging to a sort of secret order, with songs and passwords, leagued in rebellion against the stuffy people who were misruling the world.

They were not a lost generation in the sense of being unfortunate or thwarted, like the young writers of the 1890s. The truth was that they had an easy time of it, even as compared with the writers who immediately preceded them. Dreiser, Anderson, Robinson, Masters and Sandburg were all in their forties before they were able to devote most of their time to writing; Sinclair Lewis was thirty-five before he made his first success with Main Street. It was different with the new group of writers. Largely as a result of what the older group had accomplished, their public was ready for them and they weren't forced to waste years working in a custom house, like Robinson, or writing advertising copy, like Anderson. At the age of twenty-four Fitzgerald was earning eighteen thousand dollars a year with his stories and novels. Hemingway, Wilder, Dos Passos and Louis Bromfield were internationally known novelists before they were thirty. They had a chance which the older men lacked to develop their craftsmanship in book after book; from the very first they were professionals.

Yet in spite of their opportunities and their achievements the generation deserved for a long time the adjective that Gertrude Stein had applied to it. The reasons aren't hard to find. It was lost, first of all, because it was uprooted, schooled away and almost wrenched away from its attachment to any region or tradition. It was lost because its training had prepared it for another world than existed after the war (and because the war prepared it only for travel and excitement). It was lost because it tried to live in exile. It was lost because it accepted no older guides to conduct and because it had formed a false picture of society and the writer's place in it. The generation belonged to a period of transition from values already fixed to values that had to be created. Its members began by writing for magazines with names like transition, Broom (to make a clean sweep of it), 1924, This Quarter (existing in the pure present), S 4 N, Secession.. They were seceding from the old and yet could adhere to nothing new; they groped their way toward another scheme of life, as yet undefined; in the midst of their doubts and uneasy gestures of defiance they felt homesick for the certainties of childhood. It was not by accident that their early books were almost all nostalgic, full of the wish to recapture some remembered thing. In Paris or Pamplona, writing, drinking, watching bullfights or making love, they continued to desire a Kentucky hill cabin, a farmhouse in Iowa or Wisconsin, the Michigan woods, the blue Juniata, a country they had "lost, ah, lost," as Thomas Wolfe kept saying; a home to which they couldn't go back.

I wrote this book almost twenty years ago. At the time I was trying to set down the story of the lost generation while its adventures were still fresh in my mind. I wanted to tell how it earned its name and tried to live up to it, then how it ceased to be lost, how, in a sense, it found itself. Since I had shared in many of the adventures I planned to tell a little of my own story, but only as illustration of what had happened to others. Essentially what I wanted to write was less a record of events than a narrative of ideas. But the ideas would be of a certain type: they were not the ones that people thought they held at the time or consciously expressed in books and book reviews; they were rather the ideas that half-unconsciously guided their actions, the ideas that they lived and wrote by. In other words I was trying to write something broader in scope than a literary history. Ideas or purposes of this nature are always connected with a general situation that is social and economic before becoming literary. They react on the situation that produced them, they conflict with one another and they end by affecting the lives of many who never regarded themselves as literary or artistic ---for example, in the late 1920s there were people all over the country who had never been to New York and yet were acting and talking like Greenwich Villagers. Writers don't exist in a vacuum; they have masters and disciples and casual readers; in periods of change they are more sensitive and barometric than the other professions. So, the story of the lost generation and its return from exile would be something else besides; it would help to suggest the story of the American educated classes, what some of them thought about in the boom days and how they reached the end of an era.

The book that was published in 1934 fell considerably short of those aims, and I am grateful to the Viking Press for giving me this opportunity to revise it. I hate to write and love to revise, and the first edition of Exile's Return gave me plenty of scope for practicing my favorite trade of revisionist. When I reread the book carefully for the first time in years, I realized how many gaps there were in the story. The chapter on Harry Crosby was one example; it had meaning in itself but I had failed to show its connection with the rest of the narrative. The intimate reason for that failure was clear enough, in 1951; I had written at length about the life of Harry Crosby, whom I scarcely knew, in order to avoid discussing the more recent death of Hart Crane, whom I knew so well that I still couldn't bear to write about him.

The whole conclusion of the book was out of scale with the beginning; and there were also the political opinions that intruded into the narrative. I had to explain to myself, before explaining to the reader, that the book was written in the trough of the depression, when there seemed to be an economic or political explanation for everything that happened to human beings. "The trough of the depression," I have just said, taking the first phrase that came into my mind; but actually the years 1933 and 1934 were a madly hopeful time when it seemed that great changes in the economic system were already under way. Russia in those days didn't impress us as a despotism or as the great antagonist in a struggle for world power; it was busy within its own boundaries trying to create what promised to be a happier future. "We are changing the world!" the Young Pioneers used to chant as they marched through the streets of Moscow. Here too it seemed that everybody was trying to change the world and create the future; it was the special pride and presumption of the period. We hadn't learned then---nor have most of our statesmen learned today---that human society is necessarily imperfect and may disappear from the earth unless it comes to accept what T. S. Eliot calls "the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet."

Opinions about the future of society are political opinions. There were not many of them in the book I wrote in 1934, but there were too many for a narrative that dealt with the 1920s, when writers were trying to be unconcerned with politics, and I have omitted most of them from the new edition. I have expanded the last part of the book, to bring it into scale with the beginning (besides putting Harry Crosby into the right perspective), and I have written a new epilogue to round out the story. On the other hand, while adding new episodes here and there, I have left most of the narrative untouched, out of a feeling that myself in 1934 had as good a right to be heard as myself today; where he went wrong I would rather have others correct him. It seems to me now that many characters in the story, myself included, did very foolish things---but perhaps the young writers of the present age aren't young or foolish enough and, once out of college and the army, settle down too safely to earning a sensible living. Moreover, there is this to say about the foolishness of writers in the 1920s, that even the worst of it caused no suffering except to the perpetrators of the foolishness and their immediate families. It wasn't like the statesmen's high-principled foolishness of later years, in all countries, which has left them in office while bringing the rest of us to the brink of something we aren't prepared to face.