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The first great Mormon literature came only with the “Lost Generation” of the 40s, with authors like Maurine Whipple and Virginia Sorensen. The novel has flourished (with Levi Peterson a major figure), as has the short story (Douglas Thayer and Donald Marshall leading the way) poetry, and even science fiction (Orson Scott Card).

Chapter three considers the relationship between detective fiction and war fiction and the impact of one style upon the other to create a ‘war noir’. Taking examples from renowned World War One novels, it will demonstrate that the same disillusionment and despair prevalent in the work of the renowned Lost Generation is equally prevalent in Chandler’s novels. Reading his novels as a convergence of the war novel and crime fiction, one can reconsider Chandler’s work as a legitimate representation of society and the trauma of war.

This chapter discusses the difficulty writers faced in writing about Greece at the start of the 1920s. It argues that a new conception of Greece, one not based on classical or Romantic texts, required some contact with the country and its people. However, for Americans, Greece was the lost country for both the Lost Generation and the generation after that. Greece had only slightly more literary travelers from Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. By the end of the 1930s, a new modern Greece had still not emerged in English writing. From 1929 to 1934, authors experimented with tragic Greece, the Byzantine legacy, and Cavafian Athens, and these ideas have all to some degree been subsumed into what we now think of as “Greece”. But none of them gained a wide following, especially in the years that followed. The drought in writing about Greece from 1935 to 19389 was just as bad as the one that had lasted from 1924 to 1929.

This chapter focuses on the first recorded devil blues song, Clara Smith's "Done Sold My Soul to the Devil" (1924). Public anxiety about the moral hazards experienced by black female migrants to the urban North offers one context for the song, but so does the rejection of Victorian morality by a transracial cohort of Lost Generation youth for whom the devil was an admirable figure rather than fear-inducing phantom: a master of the revels and instigator of "bad behavior" of the sort playfully chastised by Fats Waller in "There's Gonna Be the Devil to Pay." Couples dancing was a key issue: both black and white ministers condemned it, along with the "devil dance dens" in which it supposedly thrived, but blues singers like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Sippie Wallace sang songs in which they partied with the devil—joyously in Rainey's case, uneasily in Wallace's.

This chapter explores the question, posed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, ‘How can one be homesick for a home that one never had?’ Its focus is Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, the director’s most overt and sustained meditation on nostalgia, and the most wooing. The film concerns a twenty-first-century Hollywood screenwriter, Gil Pender, who stumbles effortlessly through the space-time continuum to find himself (in both senses) among Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation, a world he has always believed to be his spiritual home. Through Gil’s time-travelling odyssey, Allen probes the allure and the perils of nostalgia; he shows how nostalgia relies on impossibility or absence to feed it, to lend it piquancy and artistic efficacy. The chapter also examines the Lost Generation’s propulsive nostalgia which was spawned by a tremendous sense of rootlessness and flux, and why the Odyssey was a guiding text for expatriates like Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.

This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a predicament in which war itself becomes a kind of Ithaca, the only home to which the adolescent soldier has any intimate or tangible connection. Narrator Paul Bäumer and his schoolfellows inhabit a No Man’s Land of their own: they are young but have lost hope; they feel old but have no yesteryear; they are refugees whose yearning is without shape or object. Whatever images of home they had when they enlisted, whatever plans for the future, were too nebulous, too lacking in resilience to compete with war’s intensity, its ubiquity and noise. The chapter shows that, despite its apparent pessimism, All Quiet was envisaged as a first step towards finding the ‘way back’ and pointing out ‘the road onward’, and that writing the book was itself a form of nostos.