The (Hi)story of Their Lives: Mythic Autobiography and "The Lost Generation"

Author(s): Marc Dolan

Source: Journal of American Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Apr., 1993), pp. 35-56
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Association for
American Studies
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 The (Hi) story of their Lives:
Mythic Autobiography and
"The Lost Generation"
MARC DOLAN

Of what use is autobiography to history? At first glance, aut

would seem invaluable to historians. After all, no attempt to
or understand the past would seem complete without a sp
quotations from some form of "eyewitness account. " Among
forms of such accounts available to historians, the formal aut
often provides the most comprehensive and comprehens
extant of the personal experience of historical events.1 Yet ev
an admirer of the genre as Allan Nevins was forced to admit t
autobiographies were ideally suited to the traditional historia
Most, he conceded, were "imperfect" historical documents a
could prove "far more deeply misleading" than many oth
sources.2
Considered schematically, there are five frequently-raised, formal
objections that twentieth-century historians like Nevins have made to the
indiscriminate use of formal autobiographies as primary sources of
historical evidence. All five objections are variations on some fairly
standard historiographical problems; and while none of these objections
Marc Dolan was recently Lecturer in American History and Literature, Harvard
University. He wishes to thank Donald Fleming, Warner Berthoff and (especially) Bob
Lamb for their comments on versions of this essay.
1 In speaking of "the formal autobiography," I seek to distinguish, à la Marc Bloch,
between those autobiographical texts clearly intended for a public and frequently
posterior audience, hereafter " formal autobiographies " ; and those eventually published
texts that were originally intended for more private purposes. (Postmodernist critics
should note that my use of the word "formal" is not to be considered identical to
current usage of the word "performative." For what it's worth, I consider all texts
performative.)
2 Allan Nevins, "The Autobiography," collected in Allan Nevins on History, compiled
and introduced by Ray Allen Billington (New York: Scribners, 1975)» *37-38- For a
good example of Nevins' earlier praise of the genre, see Nevins, The Gateway to History
(1938; rept. New York: D. Appleton & Century, 1938), 323.

Journal of American Studies, 27 (1993), 1, 35-56 © 1993 Cambridge University Press

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36 Marc Dolati

is damaging enough in its own right to rule out any and all evidentiary use
of formal autobiography, taken together these five objections are enough
to give us pause. For example, one standard objection - the limited,
distorting perspective provided on history by the evidence of a single
consciousness - is clearly part of the ongoing historiographical debate
over the relative merits of so-called "objective" and "subjective"
approaches to history. This debate is also sometimes configured as a
conflict between the study of "historical events" and the study of
"historical experience," or as the conflict between "scientific," "quan-
titative" history and "artistic," "qualitative" history. At base, the
problem is fairly simple. Which is more valuable to historical studies:
historical knowledge that concerns itself with objectively verifiable
political, sociological, and economic "events" (occurrences or trends that
can be reasonably demonstrated by recourse to valid documentary and/or
statistical evidence) ; or historical knowledge that concerns itself with the
ultimately unverifiable, inner "experience" of the past as lived by its
individual citizens (the internal, subjective knowledge that G. M. Young
once delineated as "not what happened, but what people felt about when
it was happening")?3
Even if this first objection to formal autobiography may be surmounted
fairly easily (by declaring that "historical events" and "historical
experience" are both equally important to historical studies), a second,
related objection - to the genre's overall emphasis on a single life, rather
than the "collective life" or interconnected lives of a community, a
nation, or an age - proves slightly more difficult to elude. Ultimately, this
second problem comes down to a question of priority : how do we go
about integrating these two separate, very different types of historical
knowledge? Do we, as David Hackett Fisher suggests, first use statistical
evidence to determine what he calls "modal tendencies" in a given era,
and then select individual accounts ofthat experience that provide us with
statistically confirmed "modal characters"? Or do we, as David Levin
proposes, begin with the subjective account of historical experience, and
then work outward from these insights to the collateral evidence that
confirms those individual tendencies that are characteristic rather than

3 G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936; rept. London: Oxford

University Press, i960), vi. On the idea of " historical experience," also see: Peter Gay,
General Introduction to The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud, in Gay,
Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 9-16;
Bernard Bailyn, "The Challenge of Modern Historiography," American Historical
Review, 87 (1982), 1-24, esp. pp. 18-22; and Raymond Williams, The English Novel from
Dickens to Lawrence (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 185-92.

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 Mythic Autobiography and " The Löst Generation" 37

idiosyncratic in a given period ? This may seem like hairsplitting, but if we

seek out a particular life story for closer study, have we not already
decided that it is in some way "representative," i.e., that it shores up the
historical knowledge that we have already determined to be important?4
Ultimately, neither of these problems of "subjectivity" and "ob-
jectivity" can ever be satisfactorily resolved, nor will we find a satisfactory
resolution to the historiographical controversy that lies behind a third
objection - the genre's near-axiomatic recourse to linear narrative.
Theoreticians like Karl Popper and Carl Hempel have advanced shrewd,
cogent arguments regarding the essential falsity of narrative form, while
historical philosophers like Michael Oakeshott and J. H. Hexter have
made equally compelling cases for the Bergsonian view that history is
experienced as continuity rather than segmentation and should conse-
quently be represented as such. "Change in history," as Oakeshott
observed in 1933, "carries with it its own explanation; the course of
events is one, so far integrated, so far filled in and complete, that no
external cause or reason is looked for or required in order to account for
any particular event. " History, in other words, resides in contingency as
much as in more obvious, overdetermined causes. To remove contin-
gency - to remove the continuity of narratively rather than analytically
organized historiography - is thus to simplify the true causality of
historical events.5
Opposing camps in all three of these historiographical debates have
been active for some time. (Certainly, no thinking historian of the last
century and a half would have taken any of these issues for granted.) But
the historiographical problems that lie behind the two remaining
objections to formal autobiography - to its obscuring literariness and its
frequent distance from the events described - remained dormant until
quite recently. Historians of all stripes, from R. G. Collingwood to

4 David Hackett Fisher, "The Braided Narrative: Substance and Form in Social
History," in Angus Fletcher, ed., The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English
Institute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), esp. 123-26; and David
Levin, In Defense of Historical Literature: Essays on American History, Autobiography,
Drama, and Fiction (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), esp. Chs. 2 and 3. On these issues
and their relation to the current vogue of cultural history discussed below, cf.
Dominick LaCapra, "Is Everyone a Mentalité Case?" in History and Criticism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 71-94.
6 Michael Oakeshott, "Historical Continuity and Casual Analysis," collected in William
H. Dray, ed., Philosophical Analysis in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 207.
On this point, also see the essays by Carl Hempel and Alan Donagan in Dray's
anthology, as well as J. H. Hexter, "The Rhetoric of History," in The Rhetoric of
History (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1971), 15-76.

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38 Marc Do Ian

E. H. Carr, from Allan Nevins to Marc Bloch, could all agree that a
published memoir written decades after the fact needed to be regarded
more skeptically than a deed-register, a census-report, or even a
contemporaneous account taken from a diary or letter. " [T]here can be no
doubt, " Bloch wrote in the posthumously published The Historian's Craft
(1953), a historiographical "bible" for several generations of historians,
"that, in the course of its development, historical research has gradually
been led to place more and more confidence ... in the evidence of witnesses
in spite of themselves. " "Even in the present," Bloch observed, writing
in 1942, "who among us would not prefer to get hold of a few secret
chancellery papers or some confidential military reports, to having all the
newspapers of 1938 or 193 9p"6
Such historiographical unanimity has disappeared, however, with the
recent rise of the so-called "new cultural history. " Eschewing many of the
evidentiary rules honored by professional historians from Leopold von
Ranke forward, cultural historians of the 1980s and 1990s have adopted
a historiographical practice that frequently falls halfway between
anthropology and literary criticism, drawing on the insights and
methodologies of both fields. As Lynn Hunt has observed, this new form
of historiographical practice is increasingly interested in the oddly textual
nature of historical knowledge; in the ways in which the historian's
notions of evidence and its value inevitably hinge on acts of interpretation
not unlike those of the ethnographer or literary critic. In considering the
problem of representativeness alluded to above, for example, cultural
historian Robert Darnton freely admits that he " [cannot] see a clear way
of distinguishing idiom from individuality," but asserts that "[t]o
proceed ... by first establishing an idiom and then explaining the individual
expression [i.e., as David Hackett Fisher proposed doing when selecting
a "modal character"] does not seem workable." "We never meet pure
idiom," Darnton notes, "[w]e interpret texts."7
It would be comforting for our purposes to take Darnton's last
statement as gospel - to assert that, since all historical knowledge comes
6 Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, tr. Peter Putnam (New York : Vintage Books, 1953),
61, 62. For further illustrative examples of these objections, see: Nevins, Gateway,
3 1 8-32 ; R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946 ; rept. London : Oxford University
Press, 1956), 295-96; and E. H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books,
1961), 16-20.
7 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
(1984; rept. New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 262. For a full account of the
complicated origins of these recent movements, see Lynn Hunt, "Introduction:
History, Culture, and Text," in Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), 1-22.

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 Mythic Autobiography and " The host Generation" 39

to us by way of textual evidence, there can be no valid unique objections

to employing formal autobiography any way we want to - but such an
easy assertion would be ill-advised. Yet the ideas of contemporary cultural
history do suggest a possible means of minimizing our five objections,
even if we cannot eliminate them altogether. What if we treated the rhetoric
of a formal autobiography as "historical fact" rather than as its content?
Darnton, Dominick LaCapra and the other practitioners of the "new"
cultural and intellectual history do have a point: the one thing that we do
know exists is the text. Rather than reading a formal autobiography as a
documentary account of factual events and judging its dubious veracity
accordingly, perhaps we should read it instead as a rhetorically constructed
account of the relation of narrated past to narrating present within the life
of a particular individual. In line with the foregoing discussion, we may
most reliably posit that such accounts often betray their "true" historical
information less through their manifest content than through their
rhetorical devices, their dialogic relations with the past, and their
discernible traces of subjectivity. They also reveal similarly valuable
historical traces both through their narrative form and discourse and
through their signs of post facto revision via a particular, self-justifying
consciousness.8
Another way of putting this would be to say that, in order to employ
formal autobiographies as historical evidence, we must read them as myth,
not fact; as simultaneously personal and tribal myths; as myths not just of
the self or the age, but myths of the relation between the two.
Consequently, just as each autobiographical myth constitutes a separate
historical " fact, " any pattern of autobiographical mythology - any shared,
near-contemporaneous re-imagining of the past that travels across and
among autobiographical texts -is a "fact" of paramount historical
significance. Such "facts" may be found, not in instances of the same,
repeatedly retold anecdote, nor even in multiple accounts of the same
"event" from different angles, but rather in the inclusion of similar sets
of experiences or patterns of experiences. Viewed in this light, formal
autobiographies become most important to the study of history as
indications oí projection and mood, of what participants might have thought
happened around them and of how they might remember feeling while it
was occurring.

8 For LaCapra's ideas on the historical uses of rhetorical analysis, see "Rhetoric and
History," in History and Criticism, 15-44; and History, Politics, and the Novel (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1987), passim.

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4O Marc Do/an

A case in point is posedrby the numerous memoirs of Americans in

Paris in the 1920s. These volumes have proved extraordinarily influential
in shaping popular views of the period, even though professional literary
and social historians of the era have spent much of their time
demonstrating how nonfactual so many of them are. Taken as a whole,
such volumes as Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company (1956), Morley
Callaghan's That Summer in Paris (1963), and Kay Boyle's skillful revision
(1968) of Robert McAlmon's already classic Being Geniuses Together
(1938) - not to mention such lesser known but no less striking memoirs
as Harold Stearns' The Street I Know (1935), Matthew Josephson's Life
Among the Surrealists (1962), and Gorham Munson's The Awakening
Twenties (1985) - present a remarkably coherent myth of American writers
in the 1920s, a myth commonly designated in popular discourse by the
phrase "The Lost Generation."9
A full account of the myth of "The Lost Generation" and its relation
to the nonfictional and fictional writings of those who participated in its
construction and dissemination demands a thorough, book-length study.
For the purposes of this essay, however, I would like to suggest the
outlines that such a full-length treatment might take by focusing more
narrowly on the three formally autobiographical volumes that have
proven the most influential in forming popular notions of the period :
Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return (1934; 195 1); Ernest Hemingway's A
Moveable Feast (1964); and The Crack-Up (1945), a posthumous collection
of pieces by and about F. Scott Fitzgerald that was edited by Fitzgerald's
old college friend Edmund Wilson.10
These three volumes are more responsible than any other nonfictional
works for the popular myth of " The Lost Generation. " In tracing where

9 Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956); Morley
Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (New York: Coward, McCann, 1963); Robert
McAlmon and Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together (1968; rept. San Francisco: North
Point Press, 1984); Harold Stearns, The Street I Know (New York: Furman, 1935);
Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists (New York: Holt, 1962); and Gorham
Munson, The Awakening Twenties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1985).
10 Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return 2nd edn. (1934; rept. New York: Viking Press, 195 1);
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribners, 1964); and F. Scott
Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945).
These texts will hereafter be cited parenthetically within the text as ER, MF, and CU,
respectively.
For more on the problematic state of these three texts, and how it has affected several
of my readings, see Marc Dolan, "'True Stories' of 'The Lost Generation': An
Exploration of Narrative Truth and Literary Meaning in Three Memoirs of the Lost
Generation" (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1988), 171-72, 199-206, 282-93.

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 Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 41

this myth came from and how these three writers co-opted it and made it
their own, I will attempt to demonstrate how their three nonfictional/
nonfactual memoirs provide a valuable, mythic testimony of their own
experience of the 1920s. After examining how these three particular tests
participate in the construction of this myth, I will end by sketching a
theory of the myth's wider cultural implications : implications not only for
the relatively insignificant segment of the society that may be legitimately
grouped under the rubric of "The Lost Generation," but also for the
allegedly "unwritten" mass of American society in this period.
In so doing, I will be "working," as Darnton proposes cultural
historians should do, "back and forth between texts and contexts,"11
although I intend eventually to place the undeniable "fact" of these
memoirs' textuality in the foreground of my analysis. As relatively
privileged young men who were born just before the turn of the century,
Hemingway, Cowley, and Fitzgerald witnessed the birth of modern
American politics, culture, and society. In their personal testaments, they
tell us about the dawn of a new age in literature, a new age of social and
political organization, and the birth of a modern, consumer-oriented mass
culture. They speak, however, as writers and mythmakers and not as
eyewitnesses for the prosecution or defense. They communicate their true
autobiographical selves more through "lies" and "distortions" than
"facts," capturing their experience of the early twentieth century more in
a borrowed plotline, a string of semes, or a switch in focus or point-of-
view than in their manifest eyewitness accounts of Paris, New York, or
the Charlestown Prison.

The phrase "lost generation" was first employed by the German

Expressionist Franz Pfemfert in Die Aktion in 191 2 and was used
extensively in Britain and France in the first years after the war to describe
the literal age cohort that had been severely reduced by the fighting of
1914-18.12 After the publication of The Sun Also Rises, however, with its
famous paired epigraphs, the term "lost generation" could never again be
employed in so broad or international a sense. Today, even if the phrase
makes a non-specialist think of Britons or Frenchmen, most likely the

11 Darnton, 262.
12 On this general point, see Robert Wohl, The Generation 0/1914 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1979), passim. The translation of the phrase "lost
generation" from Pfemfert's Aktion article of 11 December 191 2 is Word's (p. 45).

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42 Marc D o Ian

images conjured up are of Montparnasse or the Cap d'Antibes rather than

of a row of gravestones in Flanders. These are images of presence, not
absence. All that is left of the phrase's original connotation is the vague
notion that the well-known "disillusionment" of the generation had
"something to do with the war." Why? Why did the American version
of this symbol become so popular? Why has the 1920s become, in the
popular imagination, the decade of the Lost Generation?
First, let us consider the words. "In the slogan," Malcolm Cowley tells
us at the beginning oî Exile* s Return, "the noun was more important than
the adjective" (ER, p. 4). The realization of a shared narrow identity
("generation") was more important than the implied absence ("lost") of
an established, culture-wide identity. When Gertrude Stein greets young
Ernest Hemingway with the same harsh slogan in "'Une Génération
Perdue,'" the third sketch in the published version of A Moveable Feast,
he offers an almost identical reaction, wondering "about the boy in the
garage and if he had ever been hauled in one of those vehicles when they
were converted to ambulances. " In other words, Ernest13 feels a common
bond with a young man around his own age and in almost the same breath
denies the significance of the term "lost generation." What he explicitly
denies is the adjective: "I thought that all generations were lost by
something, " he writes, " and always had been and always would be " (MF,
p. 30). As for F. Scott Fitzgerald, although he never employed the full
term in his public writings, he had been speaking and thinking of
"generations" in his writing since his first published novel, with its
famous final reference to "a new generation ... grown up to find all Gods
dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."14 "[M]y point of
vantage, " he tells us of this period of his writing in " Early Success, "
"was the dividing line between the two generations, and there I
sat -somewhat self-consciously" (CU, p. 87).
Notwithstanding Hemingway's assertion that all generations were
"lost by something," it is still worth asking why this "generation" was
so aware of itself. If we examine the historical record, we see that the sense
of common identity they discovered in age sprang from their demographic
uniqueness. As Paula Fass has demonstrated, the years from 1870 to 1930
showed a steady decline in the national birth rate and consequently in the
size of the family unit. The early 1920s (the time of Fitzgerald's

13 To avoid confusion, I have adopted the device throughout this essay of referring to
protagonists by their given names and authors by their surnames. Thus, in this case, A
Moveable Feast is a book by "Hemingway" about "Ernest."
14 Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Scribner's, 1920), 282.

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 Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 43

"younger" generation and Cowley's "youngest" generation) witnessed

an unprecedented interest in youth and their "moral situation" precisely
because the young segment of the population was steadily declining.
"Whereas," Fass observes, "in 1870 there were two persons 24 to 64
years of age to every one 15 to 24 years, there were three older persons
to every one youth in 1930. "15
In other words, the members of the "Lost Generation" felt the full
weight of the noun in that slogan precisely because they stood at the
beginning of an obviously growing demographic trend. They werevthe
first generation to represent a declining proportion of youth, and that
decline would continue throughout the 1920s, the first years of which they
certainly dominated. Because of these developments, not only did they
become the focus for a great deal of public commentary, they also became
the pundits of the era. This is the shrewd truth behind Fitzgerald's
comment about his "peculiar vantage point," not to mention the
vignettes that dominate the second chapter ("War in Bohemia") of
Cowley's narrative. Among the popular arts of the period, from "Bernice
Bobs Her Hair" to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and from Flaming Youth (both
novel and film) to The Sun Also Rises, the works that focused on "youth"
or "generation" were inevitably engaged in the dramatization of a
popular type.
To be sure, "youth" had started being a prominent topic of American
writing before the war, just as "the American girl" had been a popular
topic for American writing throughout the latter half of the nineteenth
century. But what distinguished these postwar writings from prewar texts
by Booth Tarkington and others was the sense, initiated by the publication
of This Side of Paradise (and books like it) and driven home by the
publication of The Sun Also Rises (and its many literary imitators) that
"youth" was now speaking for itself. In their memoirs of the 1920s, both
Cowley and Fitzgerald directly address the issue of what it meant to be
"young" then, while Hemingway rather noticeably ignores it, save for the
instance quoted above. But all three authors carry their youth like a badge
of honor. Only Cowley is not wholly wistful about it. By 195 1 he could
characterize the 1920s as "easy, quick, adventurous... [and] good to be
young in, " all the while insisting that " on coming out of [them] one felt
a sense of relief" (JER, p. 309).
So, according to their autobiographical testimony, the word "genera-
tion" had powerful significance for these three writers and their
15 Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977),
58.

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44 Marc Dolan

contemporaries almost from the moment they came of age. "Lost,"

however, came later. Because of the low rate of mortality among
American soldiers in the war (relative to European casualties), it is difficult
to find any usage of the term "lost generation" in America before 1926,
the year of Hemingway's celebrated first novel. After that point, as
Cowley notes, the phrase became a fetish, even "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" (ER, p. 3).
The phrase had stuck and finally made the moral baggage of the term
"younger generation" explicit. Such young men and women were
"lost" - they had lost their moral bearings.
In essence, what Hemingway had done was to give an Anglo-European
name ("lost generation") to an American phenomenon (the rise of a
noticeable and noticeably anti-traditionalist youth cohort), but that was
not the end of the story. The phrase "lost generation," like any mythic
signifier, contains many meanings. If Cowley's report about the reception
of Hemingway's novel and its paired epigraphs may be believed, then a
second shift in dominant meaning occurred between 1926 (when the term
was first applied in its moral/ American sense) and 193 1 (when both
Fitzgerald and Cowley began their cultural and ideological inquiries into
the recent past). In the late 1920s, the term "lost generation," captured
for Americans by Hemingway, shifted from a moral to a cultural
connotation. In the process of moving from "a lost generation" at the
opening of Hemingway's novel to "the lost generation" on the first page
of Cowley's narrative of ideas, the phenomenon of loss came to mean less
"moral looseness" and more " deracination. " The suggestion of
deracination was there in The Sun Also Rises, to be sure, but it was
overpowered by the issue of problematic morality among the exiles.
By the time Cowley sat down to write the first installments of the
serialized text of Exile's Return in the spring of 193 1, and Fitzgerald
"Echoes of the Jazz Age" later that summer, there was no longer any
question of blaming the members of this generation for their loss, as there
had been in the earlier moral formulation. Now there was the alternative
notion that these men and women were victims of history. The term had
undergone a subtle change in the years surrounding the apocalyptically
perceived Wall Street Crash, and in so doing it had also acquired an
implicit mythic narrative as well. Writing to Max Perkins in May of 193 1,
Fitzgerald declared that the Jazz Age was now "over." It had
"extended," Fitzgerald wrote, "from the suppression of the riots on May
Day 19 1 9 to the crash of the stock market in 1929 -almost exactly one

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 Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 45

decade. "16 As the essay that grew out of these comments subsequently
demonstrated, Fitzgerald saw the historical narrative ofthat decade chiefly
as the transit of his own generation from ebullience to dissipation. This
even influenced him to the extent of placing the zenith of the decade's
characteristic behavior as early as 1922. "That was the peak of the
younger generation," he wrote, "for though the Jazz Age continued, it
became less and less an affair of youth . . . like a children's party taken over
by the elders" (O7, p. 15).
Even in his prior, off-the-cuff assertion to Perkins, the mythic narrative
that Fitzgerald perceived in the decade and presented in his auto-
biographical writings had a clear protagonist (his own generation), a clear
beginning (the heady days after the War), and a very clear end (the
despondent time just after the Crash) - but the middle stretches of that
mythic narrative remained oddly murky. In general, this may be said of
Cowley's and Hemingway's historical/autobiographical narratives as
well. The so-called "Lost Generation" is absent from our three texts
during the middle years of the decade. What we find in the
autobiographical writings of Hemingway, Cowley, and Fitzgerald are
thick descriptions of the generation in the early 1920s (visions of heady
youth) and then in the late 1920s (images of doom and self-destruction).
We very seldom see the transformation between these two stages, the
necessary intermediary stage between honest enjoyment and self-
indulgence. The reasons for Ernest's infidelity in A Moveable Feast, for
example, are implied, not stated; we see Kenneth Burke at the beginning
of Exile's Return and Harry Crosby at the end but are only given a
suggestion as to how Malcolm Cowley is a link between these two icons;
F. Scott Fitzgerald describes both his early success and his crack-up a
number of times in Edmund Wilson's posthumous collection, but he
never shows us the connections between these two phases of his life.
When any of these three authors speaks of the events of the mid- 1920s,
he widens the story so that he need not dwell on its more personal elements.
In the central passage of these tales, the individual and group centers of
generational consciousness to which we have grown accustomed vanish
for the middle stretches of the decade, leaving us to investigate a more
widely conceived version of the postwar period than any we have seen in
the narrative so far. Thus the middle third of A Moveable Feast depicts the
world of literary memoir and the celebrated cafés; this world provides the

16 Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, [ca. 1 5 May 193 1], in John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer,
eds., Dear Scott/Dear Max (New York: Scribners, 1971), 171.

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46 Marc Do/an

implied causal link between Ernest the devoted husband and Ernest the
adulterer. Likewise, the years between Broom and the Crash pass in Exile's
Return in a blurred summary of "Mass Production, Babbittry, [and] Our
Business Civilization" (ER, p. 217), which is, one supposes, intended to
explain why poets like Hart Crane and Harry Crosby killed themselves.
And it is in the middle of "Echoes of the Jazz Age" that Fitzgerald
provides his frequently cited analysis of popular films and novels, leaving
aside for the moment his crucial group protagonist of rich young people.
That, Fitzgerald's text almost suggests, is how they got from the
productive atmosphere of postwar New York to the seductive sur-
roundings of the Cap d'Antibes.
What we have in each of these three formal autobiographies, then, is a
journey from the initial realization of "generation" to the eventual
realization of "lost." What is significant about this symbolic pattern is
that in all three cases we must pass through an area of wider focus
(Modernist writers, business civilization, popular culture) in order to get
from the noun to the adjective that is supposed to modify or describe it.
The journey out in all three narratives begins with the realization of
unique identity ("generation"). In the separate texts, this is signified by
the act of writing the first good story ("A Good Café on the Place St.-
Michel" in A Moveable F east) ' the eye-opening experience of the war and
Greenwich Village ("Mansions in the Air" and "War in Bohemia" in
Exile's Return) ; and the liberating Zeitgeist of prewar college and postwar
New York (described in three different forms in Fitzgerald's " Echoes of
the Jazz Age," "My Lost City," and "Early Success"). This feeling of
uniqueness lasts a while and then fades, as it becomes apparent that what
is unique about the generation is what they lack rather than what they
possess. This is the final realization of "lost," the realization of the late
1920s, whose two separate stages we have already examined. To admit one
was "lost" was to wish to be "found," and so the early 1930s were a sort
of homecoming, as Cowley contends in Exile's Return^ just as the early
part of the decade was a sort of departure.
Cowley articulates this perception of a real-life arrival/departure motif
even better in the Epilogue to the second edition of his memoirs when he
notes, on rereading them seventeen years after their initial composition,
that their story "seems to follow the old pattern of alienation and
reintegration, or departure and return, that is repeated in scores of
European myths ..." (ER, p. 289). What it follows - what all three texts
follow, in fact - is Joseph Campbell's famous outline of the " protomyth, "
the general narrative line of mythic adventure that cuts across most of the

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 Mythic Autobiography and " The host Generation" 47

world's cultures, especially post-agricultural ones.17 But what these three

historical autobiographers were trying to do was slightly more soph-
isticated than a run-of-the-mill, Eliotesque variation on the "blighted
land "/"Holy Grail" theme. By merging their own personal histories with
those of the perceived "generation," they were telling two mythic
narratives (a personal story and a generational story) by blending them
into a third mythic narrative (a "representative" story of "the lost
generation").
This implied heroic narrative explains a number of stylistic and tropical
peculiarities that traverse the three texts. For one thing, there is the matter
of shifting personification, particularly in the writings of Cowley and
Fitzgerald. In the first chapter of Exile's Return, for example, the
antecedent of the first person plural shifts from each subsection to the
next : from the contemporary grouping of Cowley and his dialogically
inscribed reader(s) in "Blue Juniata"; to the historical grouping of
Malcolm and his teenage friends in "Big-Town High School"; to just
Malcolm and young Kenneth Burke in "Apprentice of the Arts"; to
anyone who attended college in the prewar period in "American College,
1916"; to all young Americans who served in noncombatant roles in the
war in "Ambulance Service." Each shift in antecedent is accomplished
through a transitional excursion into either the cool, historical third
person plural or the direct, anecdotal first person singular. The ambiguous,
generational, active "we" is constantly mediating between these two
passive antecedent poles ; the potential polysemy of the first person plural
thus makes it the perfect pronoun for the protagonist of a text that
attempts to merge public history and personal memoir. In reality, almost
no single individual had the precise set of historical experiences attributed
to this protean first person plural protagonist - not even Malcolm
Cowley.
Beyond this implicit, generational narrative, there are also the symbolic
activities ("dissipation," "exile," "self-destruction," and "youth") that
we normally associate with that grouping. It should not surprise us that
these symbolic activities help reinforce the larger narrative pattern that we
have already uncovered. An activity like alcoholic consumption, as it is
used in these stories, can convey the shift in mood from honest enjoyment

17 The classic summary of the "protomyth" is in Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 245-46. For the extent to which
temporal and regional variations can affect its narrative contours, see also Campbell, The
Masks of God, 4 vols. (New York: Viking Press, 1959-69); and Campbell, Historical
Atlas of World Mythology, 5 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988-89).

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48 Marc Do/an

in the former part of the decade to pure self-indulgence in the latter phase,
merely by its impenetrable symbolism; the versatility of drunkenness as a
seme for the era is that it may be employed as either a seme of Joy or a
seme of Dissipation depending on the context in which it is placed. Like
Chanel's famous little black dress, it goes with everything: immaturity,
exhilaration, fanciful visions, obsessive behavior, sudden violence, and
the depths of despondency. Like the shifting antecedent of the personal
pronoun, the pure signifier of alcoholic consumption allows these three
authors to tell a personal, metaphorical "story" about public, metony-
mical "history." In other words, the point of the prominence of alcohol
in "A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel" or "Echoes of the Jazz Age"
or Cowley's "Significant Gesture" is not to convey the specious "fact"
that everyone drank their way through the 1920s, but rather to make
readers understand that the closest group of analogous experiences to the
feeling of living through the period are the variety of ways that one can
react to alcohol.

Like the symbolic field of alcoholic consumption, the words, types,

experiences, and settings (Paris, the Riviera, and New York City) that we
commonly associate with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Cowley belong to
the domain of "narrative truth" that Donald Spence describes, rather
than to the parallel domain that he delineates as "historical fact." Taken
as a whole, all these common mythic tropes constitute the symbolic field
of "the Lost Generation" and add up to a common historical "mood"
evoked through constant incantation and repetition of tropes. This
"mood" is the chief historical "meaning" conveyed by all these
stories - in the sense that Spence speaks of "meaning" intertwined with
"interpretation"- whether they emphasize youth (like Hemingway),
cooptation (like Cowley), or middle-aged generativity (like Fitzgerald). In
all the stories, the mood is the message; and the message is true, whether
or not "the facts" are verifiable.18

18 It should be noted that all three authors provide their readers with explicit warnings
that their texts should not be taken at face value. The most blatant of these is
Hemingway's posthumously edited remark, in the Preface to the published edition of
A Moveable Feast, that "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction"
(MF, p. ix). The author is even blunter in most of the surviving manuscript drafts of
this passage, simply writing " This book is fiction " and leaving it at that. Less overt but
no less significant are Fitzgerald's admission that "it all seems rosy and romantic" in
his account of the period (CU, p. 22), as well as Cowley's climactic invocation in the
revised text of Exile9 s Return of "the children in Grimm's fairy tales" (ER, p. 288) as
analogues to his protagonists.
On "narrative truth" vs. "historical truth," see in particular Donald Spence,
Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 292 and passim.

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 Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 49

In many ways, the transit of the phrase " the Lost Generation, " like that
of the mythic symbol and mythic narrative it embodies, reflects this
gradual shift in mood. So does the possibly erroneous etymology that
Fitzgerald traces early in "Echoes of the Jazz Age":

The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then
dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not
unlike that of big cities behind the lines in a war (CU, p. 16).

As parochial as this passage might seem as a factual description of 1920s

popular culture (especially popular music),19 it is a shrewd encapsulation
of the mythic narrative of the Lost Generation: from sex to dancing to
music and on; from youthful exuberance to group activity to public
performance and stylization. Writing in the spring and summer of 193 1,
this was how both Fitzgerald and Cowley saw their mythic journeys of the
previous decade -as a jerky "progress toward respectability." Looking
back on the same period from the vantage point of the late 1950s, even
willful Ernest Hemingway probably would not have disagreed.

II

We could carry our mythic reading of these three texts farther still, but the
general outlines of such a reading have been sufficiently established. In
reading Exile's Return, A Moveable Feast, and the Fitzgerald essays in The
Crack-Up as literary and mythic rather than documentary texts, we have
discovered a number of things about their authors' perception of how and
why America changed during the 1920s ; as well as about their perceptions
of their own relation, both to that perceived change and to contemporary
Americans of similar ages, backgrounds, and interests. Most important,
we have discovered that all three authors shared a common notion of the
narrative transit of the 1920s, the tripartite structure that I have outlined
above.

Now all this is very interesting, but is it historically valuable? After all,
we can dismiss objections as to literariness by scrutinizing a text's rhetoric
rather than its disputable and possibly even irrecoverable referent; we can
read a narrative's linear shape as a form of hypothesis and not as fact; we
can be fully alert to textual traces of self- justifying consciousness and the
relation of narrated past to narrating present (two topics I have not had

19 See, for example, LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York : William Morrow &c Co., 1963),
Chs. 6-10; and Günther Schuller, Early Ja^: Its Roots and Musical Development (New
York: Oxford University Press,. 1968), passim.

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5 o Marc Dolati

sufficient time to treat in their necessary depth here) - but, after all that,
we are still left with the most nagging objection of all: putative
representativeness. Why these three lives? Even if we had the time to
perform the same sort of analysis for the three dozen or so other formal
autobiographies of "The Lost Generation," what would that tell us in the
end? Simply what three dozen people who had more education, time, and
money than they knew what to do with thought was going on in the 1920s ?
Where's the historical value in that?

We may find a suggestion of an answer to this question in the

extratextual resonances of several topics raised and dropped earlier in our
analysis. For example, we theorized that what the myth of the Lost
Generation most clearly stood for was a sharply demarcated narrative
transit of mood: from joy to dissipation; from "generation" to "lost."
It is in this purely affective sense - in the idea that the decade began with
exhilaration and ended in deflation - that our three autobiographical texts
may be able to lay their most convincing claims to representativeness.
According to many contemporary observers, technological innovation
and the expansion of the consumer-oriented aspects of the economy
combined to make the earlier part of the 1920s particularly memorable for
most Americans. In such influential works as Middletown (1929) and Only
Yesterday (193 1), authors like Robert and Helen Lynd and Frederick Lewis
Allen observed that the pace of life in these years strongly reflected the
sort of "nervous energy" that Fitzgerald implicitly ascribed to the era in
his fiction and would subsequently describe explicitly in the essays
collected in The Crack-Up, In Middle town, the Lynds characterized the
1920s in passing as "[a] period of rapidly changing standards of living,
irregular employment ... [and] increasing isolation and mobility of the
individual family...." Inevitably, Allen subscribed to a similar but less
restrained version of this view of the early 1920s as a nexus of volatile
"modernizing" forces. The legendary first chapter of Only Yester-
day - published, like " Echoes of the Jazz Age " and the first fragments of
Cowley's autobiographical narrative, in the fall of 1 931 -details a
veritable explosion of brand-new consumer goods and faddish concerns
(e.g., short skirts, bobbed hair, rouge, beauty parlors, vitamins, tabloids,
radio, sound movies, and crossword puzzles), all of which owe their first
significant period of popularity to the years between 19 19 and 1929.20
We are, of course, familiar with these aspects of the decade. They are
the ones featured by Cowley and, more notably, Fitzgerald, in those
20 Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1929), 125 ;
Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper's, 193 1), Ch. 1.

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 Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 5 1

"crowded" middle sections of their narrative lines. Symbolically, then,

the Lynds' "rapid changes" and Allen's " faddishness " supply us with the
missing narrative link between Broom and Harry Crosby in Exile's Return,
and between New York City and the Cap d'Antibes in "Echoes of the
Jazz Age. " The implications of the covert plotline of A Moveable Feast are
even more significant in this regard: by the same token, this covert
plotline would seem to suggest that the commercialization and
commodification of literary modernism (via the café set and the state
apparatus of publishing) is the true implicit cause of Ernest's seemingly
unseen transformation. Narrative logic dictates that this blurring of
aesthetic and commercial cultures implicitly transforms Ernest the sincere
young man into Ernest the two-timing weasel.
One could object that contemporaneous sociological and journalistic
accounts like those offered in Middletown and Only Yesterday are no more
immune to charges of privilege and exclusivity than are the auto-
biographical narratives of Hemingway, Cowley, and Fitzgerald. Indeed, a
highly convincing case might be made for the position that the Lynds and
Allen, as well as such other postwar journalists and intellectuals as Charles
and Mary Beard, Walter Lippmann, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Charles
Merz, played as large a role in "creating" the mythic 1920s as did the three
authors featured here. Intellectual historian John Thomas has recently
taken this argument even farther, holding that the "apocalypse" of the
1929 Crash had been heralded throughout by preceding decade by
intellectuals like Lewis Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks. To a great
extent, the post-Crash myth of the 1920s was thus "built into" the
historical experience of the 1920s through precisely the sort of prior
narrative projection and expectation that David Carr has theorized inheres
to all historical events. If this is true, though, then the myth sketched
above may be only a myth of the intelligentsia, not of the American people
at large.21
However, we need not rely solely on contemporaneous accounts for
validation. The attention of such subsequent historians of the period as
William E. Leuchtenberg, Roland Marchand, George Marsden, Lary
May, George Mowry, Robert Sklar, and Warren Susman has been equally

21 Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilisation (New York: Macmillan,
1927), 2 vols; Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
& World, 1929); Walter Lippman, A Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1929);
and Charles Merz, The Dry Decade (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 193 1).
For Thomas' argument, see "The Uses of Catastrophism : Lewis Mumford, Vernon
L. Parrington, Van Wyck Brooks, and the End of American Regionalism, " American
Quarterly, 42 (1990), 223-51.

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5 2 Marc Dolan

drawn to precisely these sorts of "mass-cultural" developments. For such

historians, those "middle years," in which "nothing happened" to
Ernest, Malcolm, and Scott, often loom as the most important years of the
decade, containing as they do such crucial events as the passage of the
immigration restriction act and a notable surge of religious funda-
mentalism that came to its well-publicized climax in the Scopes trial. If we
widen the scope by just one year at either end, we encounter the
emergence of Babe Ruth at the beginning of the decade and the
production of the last Model T at the end. If we add the Lindbergh flight
and the popular novels, films, and leisure crazes that Fitzgerald mentions,
we are talking about perhaps the first decade in American history in which
groups and not individuals dominated public discourse.22
Everywhere you turned in the mid-i92os, you encountered another
group: movie audiences, target audiences for advertising, immigrants,
motorists, sports fanatics, and religious zealots. In earlier ages one could
speak of particular groups that focused the public's attention (farmers,
speculators, workers, abolitionists, etc.) but in the 1920s it sometimes
seemed that there had never before been so many distinct, overlapping
groups, never so many all at once. One could argue that the 1920s was
less an age of group identity than of hero worship - after all, it was this
decade that essentially created the parallel phenomena of the modern
movie star and the modern sports hero - but as both May and Susman
show in their parallel analyses of these phenomena, these were less cults of
exemplary, ideal heroism (in which the celebrity was held up as a distant
object of love and adoration) than cults of personality and identification
(in which the celebrity's public identity was seen as an extension of the
fan's sense of self). In both cases, as in most mass cultural phenomena and
epiphenomena of the 1920s, it was the cult that drove its object, and not
the other way around.23

22 On these points, see: Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order
(New York: St. Martin's, 1979), Chs. 4-9; John Higham, Strangers in the hand, 2nd edn.
(1955; rept. New York: Atheneum, 1963), Chs. 10 & 11; William E. Leuchtenberg,
The Perils of Prosperity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), Ch. XI; Roland
Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985), passim; George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980), passim; Lary May, Screening Out the Past (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980), Chs. 6-8; George E. Mowry, The Urban Nation (New
York: Hill & Wang, 1965), Ch. 1; Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (New York:
Random House, 1975), Part II; and Warren Susman, Culture As History (New York:
Pantheon, 1984), passim.
23 For these specific issues, see Susman, "Culture Heroes: Ford, Barton, Ruth," in
Culture, 122-49; an<* May, Ch. 5.

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 Mythic Autobiography and " The host Generation" 5 3

The ultimate cultural significance of the myth of the Lost Generation

may lie in this phenomenon of pervasive attention to group activity that
is so characteristic of the factual 1920s. In their journey from joy to
dissipation, from the new realization of uniqueness ("generation") to the
later realization of diminished commonality ("lost"), the Lost Generation
turned its attention to the culture at large, just as the attention of
American popular culture turned away from this "youngest generation"
after the first years of the decade. In noting other people's fads and quirks
in those impersonal middle sections of their narratives, Hemingway,
Cowley, and Fitzgerald (as well as Ernest, Malcolm, and Scott) all come
to realize by implication their own status as "types," and thus discard the
bad, immature part of their youthful pride and retain the good part, the
mature sense of mollified identity. In this way, Ernest moves from the
uncertain journalist of "Miss Stein Instructs" to the self-important author
of "Birth of a New School" to the humbled, "tamed" novelist of "There
Is Never Any End to Paris." So too does Malcolm's generational "we"
move from deracinated young men to individualistic purveyors of
significant gestures to the resigned Americans that wake up ready for
work on "New Year's Day." Both protagonists are, in their turn,
following the historical pattern posed by F. Scott Fitzgerald - from
success to celebrity to the comeuppance of crack-up.
In other words, the signified journey of all these narratives is from the
false perception of cultural homogeneity through an illusive sense of
cultural uniqueness to a renewed commitment to cultural pluralism. This
is the journey that so many cohorts of Americans made in the crowded
years between the two World Wars, the same transformation that Susman
alludes to when he speaks of a shift from an overwhelming interest in
"civilization" in the 1920s to an almost mystical belief in "community"
in the 1930s. It is also the transition, which Walter Beim Michaels has
recently noted in this period, away from the polarities of political identity
and biological identity toward the radical ambiguity of cultural identity,
a "model" that, as Michaels notes, "has turned out to be - for better or
worse -the greatest cultural contribution of the classic American
literature of the '20s. "24
Throughout the decade following World War I, this pattern was
repeated over and over in American cultural life: first, a number of

24 Walter Benn Michaels, "The Vanishing American," American Literary History, 2

(1990), 238. For Susman's interpretation of the interwar years, see the essays in Part III
of Culture, especially "Culture and Civilization: The Nineteen Twenties," "The
Culture of the Thirties," and "Culture and Commitment," pp. 105-21 and 150-210.

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54 Marc Do Ian

individuals discovered they had something in common (an interest in mah

johng, a type of product they all liked to buy, or an aesthetic philosophy
that seemed tempting at the moment). Then, the group was suddenly
"discovered" by the culture at large and analyzed at length (by feature
journalists, by advertising agency employees, or by pundits in the literary
reviews). Finally, the group seemed to burn itself out, but its residue was
added to the larger picture (of game players, consumers, or American
writers). This cycle of discovery, analysis, and dissipation played itself out
hundreds of times over the course of the decade. The Lost Generation was
just one example of this phenomenon; miniature golf was another.

Ill

Even after augmenting our analysis with more conventionally derived

historical information, however, the issues examined in the beginning of
this essay still nag. Never wholly dissolved, our five objections persist;
suggesting that, no matter how architectonic a picture we may construct
of the period, we are still begging the larger historiographical question.
Even considering this newly uncovered resonance between wider
American cultural developments of the 1920s and the narrower myth of
the Lost Generation, we must still ask whether our reconstituted
knowledge of these three (textualized) lives contributes anything new and
valuable to our knowledge of America in the 1920s. Have we simply
discovered three mythically modal characters, whose lives recapitulate a
symbolic pattern already discovered elsewhere in the period? Or have we
instead reversed this process, seeking out the requisite previously
established historical knowledge that validates our initial interest but does
so only after the fact?
As I suggested above, there are no easy answers to these sorts of
questions. The key issues - subjectivity vs. objectivity, priority of data vs.
priority of methodology, narrativity vs. analysis, historical events vs.
historical experience - will never be sufficiently established for anyone's
purposes, certainly not for ours.
Yet, despite all these doubts, the perception of resonance persists. "The
Younger/ Youngest/Lost Generation" did experience that three-part
cycle, just like so many of the other publicly identified "groups" of the
1920s. The entire decade may have been, as literary critic Walter Benn
Michaels and historian George Marsden have both suggested, an
"immigrant experience" for all Americans, even those whose families had

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 Mythic Autobiography and " The Lost Generation" 5 5

arrived on the Mayflower and the Arbella : in the 1 920s, they " arrived, " like
young Malcolm Cowley, in an America they did not recognize. Like
Michaels' Native Americans and Marsden's fundamentalists, the Lost
Generation enjoyed a highly public moment of simultaneous elevation
and dissipation in the 1920s, with both processes firmly anchored in their
sense of cultural uniqueness. Culturally constructed as admirable Other,
they rose to prominence, only to discover in the end that they were just
another mass media fad.
If "historical experience" exists, and if it is possible for subsequent
scholars to recover it, then it exists in resonances such as these ; in the sorts
of shared patterns of textually inscribed subjective experience, as well as
objectively demonstrable events and demography, that New Historicist
literary critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose have dubbed
" the poetics of culture. " As Raymond Williams suggested nearly a quarter
of a century ago, it is not at all uncommon for "a unique life, in a place
and a time, [to speak] from its own uniqueness and yet [to speak] a
common experience. " In other words, the elements of this sort of cultural
discourse - what we have analyzed here as the metaphors and mythic
narratives of historical experience - often transcend the economic and
sociological categories used to classify the writers who produced them.
Such categories are occasionally more suited to the study of "historical
events" than to the parallel study of "historical experience." After all, if
it is by no means certain that canonical writers possessed greater access to
"representative" historical experience of their own time, then it is
similarly unproven that they possessed less access to it. As not only
Williams but most New Historicists would contend, it may very well be
that these common metaphors and narrative patterns point to larger
historical shifts, which transcend such material categories and point to
"structural" changes that traverse the superstructures of modern
society.26
In the end, there is no such thing as a " representative, " " typical, " or
"modal" man or woman in a given historical period. There are only
millions of individuals, many of them undocumented, most of them
irrecoverable. Given those odds, "historical experience" may prove, in
practice, to be as much of a myth as "the Lost Generation." But if it is
not a myth, and if we seek to know what a given historical period like the

25 Stephen Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of Culture" and Louis A. Montrose,

"Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture," both in H. Aram
Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1-36; Williams, Novel,
192.

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56 Marc Dolan

1920s "felt like while it was happening," then we must recover each of
the mythic life-stories of that period, one by one, from low to high, from
unfortunately forgotten to seemingly well-known. Once we have gathered
these myths, we must measure them against each other, in the hopes of
discovering palpable, resonant, historically significant patterns.

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