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Ernest Hemingway pulled no punches when it came to decrying Gertrude Stein's insistence that his was a "lost generation."1 In his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast, Hemingway vehemently dismisses his former mentor's "lost generation talk" and attempts to shield postwar American writers from what he took to be Stein's unfair condemnation.2 According to Hemingway, a youthful penchant for "discipline" characterized the literary offerings of his generation while the work of Stein's fading set suffered as a result of their "egotism and mental laziness" (30). But despite the connection he makes here between himself and other artists of his generation, Hemingway's investment in the literary aptitude of his peers was considerably less ardent than was his desire to upstage the body of writers from whom he inherited his particular craft. Consequently, the "discipline" of which Hemingway speaks in A Moveable Feast applies mainly to his own painstaking mode of literary production, which was-in its enormous difficulty-an index of Hemingway's commitment to the notion that no one "could write any way except the very best he could write without destroying his talent" (155-56).3 In keeping with this maxim, Hemingway expresses irritation elsewhere in his memoir at Stein's insistence that he avoid composing works that she considered "inaccrochable," or socially unacceptable, and hence, unpublishable (15).4 From Hemingway's perspective, this sort of self-censorship-practiced purely for the sake of increasing one's chances of publication-was beneath the serious artist, and to the extent that Stein and others engaged in it, Hemingway gradually came to see himself as creating something artistically superior. His youthful bravura notwithstanding, however, Hemingway remained susceptible to what he took to be Stein's annoyance regarding his lost generation. Consequently, insofar as Hemingway felt implicated in Stein's assessment of "[a]ll of [the] young people who served in the war" (29; emphasis added), he took the position that even if his generation was lost, he most certainly was not. In Hemingway's mind, his literary output ventured beyond the limits of Stein's socalled "accrochable" literary forms just as it eclipsed the work of writers his own age.5
Hemingway rebounded from Stein's lost generation talk first in the form of a novella, The Torrents of Spring (1926), which, in its parodic treatment of Sherwood Anderson's novel Dark Laughter, could not have...