Malcolm Cowley tells his readers, "I can report this from experience" (219) when he speaks of the mass emigration of writers from New York City to the suburbs of Connecticut and New Jersey in the late 1920's. It's amusing that he mentions this over two hundred pages into his book, because his entire narrative is based upon his experiences as a young writer coming of age during this decade.

Cowley's book explains the origins of the "lost generation", of those writers and artists who were active during the 1920's, and uses himself as an emblematic figure of those writers. Therefore his book is at once highly autobiographical and very broad thematically. He writes about growing up in the Mid-West, going off to college in the East, his time spent serving in WWI, his return to New York City and then back to Europe, and finally his return once again to the States. While chronicling his own life, he also explains how the lost generation as a life-style emerged, what its underlying beliefs and philosophies were, and why, as a way of life and as an ideology, its era came to an end. The book focuses more on analyzing people and their motivations than it does on analyzing any one particular work or body of literature. But, as a source of information, it's invaluable for the way it provides a meaningful context in which to understand the literature written during this time.

Cowley often illustrates how a writer's environment fostered the type of work a writer would produce while he simultaneously describes that environment. Thus, he will explain how many young men enlisted in the army right out of college. He'll then tell you of his own experiences as an ambulance corp driver in the army, and in the same breath will mention other writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, or John Dos Passos who also drove ambulances, and who, in their books, (titleA Farewell to Arms and title1919 respectively) wrote about those experiences. He lends an enormous amount of authority to his claims simply though the vividness of his story telling. After reading descriptions of the European country side and afternoons spent drinking warm champagne, you feel how strongly these events impressed themselves upon him, and therefore, you believe him when he claims that these events affected others strongly as well.

The reader, (this reader anyway) often becomes enchanted by Cowley's vast, and at the same time tender, sense of his subject matter. He tells fascinating anecdotes about other writers. He bought stamps for James Joyce, he wrote poetry with a drunken Hart Crane. And even more interesting is how he, and apparently other writers like him, looked at people like Joyce and T.S. Eliot and evaluated them not only for their writings, but also looked at them as possible examples to be followed. Cowley asks of Eliot when he begins to describe the influence "The Waste Land" had on him, "Might a Middle-Western boy become a flawless poet?" (118). In fact, the line between story and fact in the narrative often becomes blurred. You read a line like, "On reaching the first café we stopped for a drink of beer and a waltz under the chestnut trees" (175) and feel as if you've been transported into a Hemingway novel. It's as if the author himself can't quite stick to purely recording events. He gets swept up in his own images, his own memories and emotions. But on the flip side, you again see how true to life much of the imagery other authors of this period, such as Hemingway or Fitzgerald for example, were employing. Cowley succeeds in conveying that life and art are inextricably bound together.

Cowley stresses this intertwining of life and art in part because he wants to show how, as a generation, young people in the twenties failed to acknowledge societies influence on them. Instead, he posits, they tried to remove themselves from everyday life. They ignored politics and saw society as something that functioned independently from themselves. He stresses the importance of taking economics and class systems into consideration when examining artistic trends because he believed one of the reasons many of the artistic ideals of the 1920's failed was precisely because they were inapplicable to real life.

In order to see some of Cowley's overreaching themes however, you sometimes have to have faith in him. Occasionally, he will delve into a seemingly unrelated subject and you have to follow him, bewildered, for a bit before you understand where he's going. For example, he will start a chapter speaking of Grub Street and the Augustan Age because he wants to relate that era to the bohemian culture of Greenich Village during the early part of the twentieth century. Or he'll write about Dostoyevsky's gambling habits in the 1860's when the Russian author was traveling through Europe and mention how the author's writing had become more nationalistic during his time away from Russia. From there, Cowley makes his relevant point: he and his fellow expatriates' writing had also become more nationalistic in theme once they had gone abroad. It just takes him a bit to get there. But usually, his prose is always interesting enough that you don't mind reading somewhat tangential information. He's a good explainer as well as a good story teller; he's equally adept at explaining the metaphysics of Valery as he is at telling you about the evening in Paris when he punched a café proprietor in the jaw.

Cowley also uses "we" as a way of speaking simultaneously for himself and for a larger group of people. However who this "we" is is often tricky. Sometimes it refers to his entire generation. At other points it means the middle and upper-class boys who went off to become expatriates, and still at others it means only those boys who became writers. One downside to his narration is that it usually only speaks of men. Women writers, with the exception of Gertrude Stein, are very rarely mentioned.