The Expatriate Movement( The Sun Also Rises)

Gaston Mclemore
AML 3311
Dr. Jordan
The Expatriate Movement
In its broadest sense, expatriate is any person living in a different country from where he or she is a citizen. The phenomenon and image of Americans living abroad is associated with certain cultural movements, particularly literature, in which expatriate individuals and communities were portrayed. Some prime examples are American literary notables who lived in Paris, from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression or the so-called Lost Generation, including Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, T.S Eliot and Ezra Pound to name a few.


Many of the expatriates began their exodus for a multitude of reasons; World War I and the effects that it impacted on the writers of the time, the roaring twenties and the post war psychological effects that created the lost generation that many writers fell into. This attitude led to books such as Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”. George Steiner says, “Writers of the lost generation are often less reliable citizens of their nation, and frequently carry in their mind a map of the world, an imagistic or fantastic or writer geography, on which the capitals and frontiers seem at odds with the familiar political atlas.”(Steiner) He goes on to say, “The one thing that makes this affair possible is minimal equipment needed by a writer such as an imagination, intelligence, paper and a pen or a typewriter, and financed by the oblique economics of patronage, royalty, or private income, the writer has less to bind them than most of us, is freer to choose his working location in the context of pleasure or stimulus and is more disposed to mythicize and justify the activity, to attach a dramatic value to it.”(Steiner)

Some of the reasoning behind this self-exile was the disagreement of leaders and actions of America at this time. The lost generation suffered from many non-diagnosed or recognizable disorders, most commonly was post-traumatic stress disorder. The masses that left America were not only writers and artists but many of the wealthy elite, the intellectuals, college graduates and the lost generation of war veterans. In the 1920’s African-American writers, artists, and musicians arrived in Paris and popularized jazz in Parisian nightclubs, a time when Montmartre was known as “the Harlem of Paris” (Steiner). In France, the artist movement revolved heavily around Gertrude Stein, and the emergence of Avant-Garde. She was one of the major American figures in this movement. Expatriates, writers, and artists tried to have an introduction to her in hopes of getting on her good side. “America is my country” and “Paris is my homeland” (stein). This set the bar for the expatriate movement that everybody followed.


Later on the twenties, a time of post war and economic optimism, came the influx of jazz and many African American notables such as Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Larry Potter, Mildred Thompson, and Sam Middleton.
The Expatriate movement served as one of the staples for many of the most polished American as well African American writers, artists and musicians. These expatriates suffered through a lot of uncertainty, and hardship but have triumph to help take shape the modernist movement we have today.


Works Cited
Roaring Twenties Rayburn, Kevin (1997-2000). The 1920s. [Online] http://www.louisville.edu/~kprayb01/1920s.html

LITERARY EXPATRIATES IN PARIS, The library of UNC
http://www.lib.unc.edu/rbc/french_expatriates/paris.html

Second Countries: The Expatriate Tradition in American Writing Author(s): Malcolm Bradbury Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 8, American Literature Special Number (1978), pp. 15-39 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3506762