With the Armistice of 1918, and the peacemaking of 1919 (and the 18th Amendment of the same year, that in theory made America a ‘dry’ nation), the American prose-writer entered a new period of revolt. In some ways this was a continuation of earlier movements. But the writers themselves did not think so; they acknowledged no kinship with prewar writers, except perhaps Theodore Dreiser. Henry Adams had said that the generations in American history were discontinuous: the younger did not learn from the older one, nor could it. Few of Adams’s contemporaries would have agreed with him. However, his Education, when published in a popular edition in 1918, made an immediate appeal to young people who were convinced that if they knew none of the answers, at any rate they had clues of which their parents had no inkling. Since they learned from Adams, who was old enough to be their collective grandfather, it might seem that he disproved his own theory. Such an objection, though, would have been met with the argument that Adams could make contact with them because he was out of touch with his own era. The post-war generation, the Lost Generation—when had any age-group been so self-consciously aware of itself?—laid eager claim to lost souls from the past. In reviving such figures as Melville it apologized for the stupidity of its ancestors.
