27 rue de Fleurus, the apartment of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, a Saturday evening in autumn 1924. The walls of the studio are stacked floor to ceiling with paintings bought in the 1900s when no one else wanted them. A Picasso portrait of Stein from 1906 hangs above the fireplace. Cézannes, Matisses, and Renoirs fill the spaces between. On any Saturday in this year, Ernest Hemingway might be standing near the door, twenty-five years old and nearly unknown. F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the French Riviera at this same moment, has just shipped the manuscript of The Great Gatsby to his editor in New York. Within five years, the books these two men are writing tonight will define an American literary generation. Within ten, the assembly in this room will be over. This is the story of the year before the lightning struck.
Why Paris
The structural reasons the Americans came were not romantic. The French franc had collapsed against the dollar after the war, and an American salary that bought a small apartment in New York could afford a comfortable life in the Sixth Arrondissement with a maid and dinner out every night. Prohibition in the United States had made the manufacture and sale of alcohol illegal since January 1920, and the Volstead Act had pushed American drinking culture either underground or overseas. The two pressures together produced a wave of emigration that was as much economic as it was artistic.
The cultural conditions were the rest of the equation. Paris in 1924 was the world capital of modernism, with Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev all working within walking distance of each other on the Left Bank. The city tolerated unconventional living arrangements, mixed-race relationships, and homosexual partnerships at a level Manhattan would not approach for another four decades. The galleries were full of Cubist and Surrealist work that American museums had not yet acknowledged existed. For a young American writer in 1924, Paris was simultaneously cheaper and more cosmopolitan than any city in the United States, and the answer to whether one should move was self-evident.
Hemingway in 1924
Ernest Hemingway came back to Paris from Toronto in January 1924 with his wife Hadley and their three-month-old son John, called Bumby. Hadley had given birth in Toronto the previous October. Hemingway had been working as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star for two years, sending dispatches from European political conferences. He hated the work. He quit it in early 1924 to write fiction full time.
They rented a small fourth-floor apartment at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in the Sixth Arrondissement. The building stood above a working sawmill, and the noise of the saws came up through the floorboards from dawn until evening. The Hemingways lived on Hadley’s trust fund of roughly three thousand dollars a year, which was tight in Toronto but comfortable in Paris. Hemingway wrote in pencil in cheap notebooks at the kitchen table in the morning, then went out to write more at La Closerie des Lilas in the afternoon.
In April 1924, Ford Madox Ford hired him as deputy editor of the transatlantic review, a small but well-regarded literary magazine. In October, the Paris-based Three Mountains Press published in our time, his first significant prose work, in an edition of 170 copies. Eighteen prose vignettes of war, bullfighting, and crime. The author was twenty-five years old and nearly unknown.
Fitzgerald in 1924
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda crossed the Atlantic in early May 1924. They had been living in Great Neck on Long Island, but the parties had gotten expensive and Fitzgerald had decided that the only way to write a serious novel was to leave the country. They settled at the Villa Marie in Valescure, a small town near Saint-Raphaël on the French Riviera, about six hundred miles south of Paris. The rent was approximately seventy-nine dollars a month.
Fitzgerald spent the summer writing the manuscript that would become The Great Gatsby, working in long stretches that often ran past sunrise. He drank steadily through the year, mostly cheap red wine. The work went well by his own account. The marriage went badly. In July, Zelda began an affair with Édouard Jozan, a French naval aviator stationed nearby, who was twenty-six years old and reportedly handsome. The affair lasted six weeks. When Fitzgerald discovered it, the marriage was permanently damaged, though neither of them filed for divorce.
In late October 1924, Fitzgerald shipped the manuscript to his editor Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York. Perkins read it within days and replied that it was the best thing Fitzgerald had ever written. The Fitzgeralds left the Riviera for Rome in November and spent the winter there waiting for galley proofs.
Stein’s Saturday Evenings
Gertrude Stein had been living at 27 rue de Fleurus since 1903, with her brother Leo until they separated in 1914, and from 1907 onward with Alice B. Toklas. By 1924 she was fifty years old, financially independent through family money, and presiding over the most influential American literary salon in Europe. The Saturday evening gatherings had been running for almost twenty years.
The studio walls were stacked floor to ceiling with paintings bought between 1903 and 1914 when no one else wanted them. A Picasso portrait of Stein from 1906 dominated the fireplace wall. Cézanne still lifes, Matisse interiors, Renoir nudes, and dozens of works by lesser-known painters filled the remaining space. Stein had been the first major American collector of Cubism, paying Picasso almost nothing for canvases that would later be worth millions.
The Saturday evening visitors in 1924 included Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Picasso, Matisse, and almost every American writer of consequence passing through Paris. Stein read manuscripts, gave hard advice, and corrected what she considered bad sentences. She was the most demanding editor most of them had ever met.
The phrase Lost Generation came from one of her conversations during this period. Stein had overheard a Parisian garage owner describing a young mechanic who had served in the war and never recovered as part of une génération perdue. The phrase stuck.
Shakespeare and Company
Sylvia Beach was an American expatriate from Princeton, New Jersey, who had moved to Paris in 1917 and opened a small English-language bookshop in November 1919. She moved the shop to 12 rue de l’Odéon on the Left Bank in May 1921, where it stayed until the Nazi occupation forced it to close in 1941.
By 1924, Shakespeare and Company was the unofficial headquarters of expatriate literary Paris. It functioned simultaneously as bookshop, lending library, post office, message drop, informal bank, and occasional employment office. Beach kept careful records of which writers borrowed which books, and the loan ledgers are now the most complete sociological document of the Lost Generation that exists.
In February 1922, Beach had personally published James Joyce’s Ulysses in an edition of one thousand copies, after the novel had been banned in both Britain and the United States on obscenity grounds. The publication had made the shop internationally famous and had nearly bankrupted it.
Hemingway borrowed books on credit, picked up his mail at the shop, and used the address for his correspondence with editors in New York. Beach extended him credit for two years before he could pay her back.
The Cafés
The Lost Generation lived in cafés. The rent at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs did not include heat in winter, and writing in an unheated room was difficult, so the cafés served as office space, dining room, and bar all at once for almost everyone in the circle.
La Closerie des Lilas at 171 boulevard du Montparnasse was Hemingway’s main writing café. He worked at a corner table in the back with lined notebooks and a pencil, drinking small cafés au lait that the waiters refilled without being asked, sometimes for four hours at a stretch. Le Dôme and La Rotonde across the boulevard were the social cafés where the same crowd ate cheap dinners and argued about politics into the early morning hours.
The Dingo Bar on rue Delambre was where Fitzgerald and Hemingway would meet for the first time in April 1925, when Fitzgerald walked up to Hemingway and introduced himself. The Ritz Bar on the Place Vendôme was where the writers met the rich Americans who occasionally funded them. Each café had its own crowd, its own protocols, and its own credit terms. The waiters knew everyone.
What Came Out of 1924
Within eighteen months of the end of 1924, the books that defined the Lost Generation were in print. The Great Gatsby was published by Scribner’s on April 10, 1925, in an edition of 20,870 copies, of which a substantial number remained unsold at Fitzgerald’s death in 1940. In Our Time, the expanded American edition of the Paris chapbook, was published by Boni and Liveright on October 5, 1925. The Sun Also Rises, with its Stein epigraph reading You are all a lost generation, was published by Scribner’s on October 22, 1926. The canon of the generation was made in the eighteen months following the year this article describes.
The concentration of talent did not survive the 1929 crash. The dollar fell against the franc. The magazines closed. The publishing advances from New York dried up. By 1930, most of the Americans had gone home. By 1933, almost all of them had. Hemingway moved to Key West in 1928. Fitzgerald shuttled between France and the United States through the early 1930s as his career collapsed. Stein and Toklas stayed at 27 rue de Fleurus through the Second World War.
1924 was the moment the assembly was complete, the work was being made, and nothing had yet been declared. The lightning struck in 1925.