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Expatriates

Expatriates in the Post War Era
To understand a writer one must understand their background and the experiences associated with their lives. Each writer contributes a different style of writing, thus each writer is influenced by their past memory and present way of living. Wars influence writers that are and are not involved in them. Wars can influence soldiers to write vivid pieces from detailed memories and sometimes from flashbacks that can occur. Expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry James, influenced by their living outside their native country, shared common writing styles based on social issues and personal experiences of a changing post war era.
Personal experiences were major attributes writers applied to their works. Hemingway is known for his condensed style and stories that portray man proving his significance in situations of conflict and attempted to live what he wrote (Somers 282). World War I was an experience that greatly affected writer Ernest Hemingway. On July 8, 1918, Hemingway was shot in the knee (McCarthy 141) and then spent time in an Italian hospital, which is where he fell in love with a nurse (Leggett 650). He applied this experience to his novel A Farewell to Arms (Leggett 650). He later rejoined the war only to be severely wounded by an explosion of a mortar (Burhans 284). Hemingway realized how close to death he was, and began thinking on the most sincere levels of writing; he began thinking about realism and naturalism, the accurate implication of reality, which later led to his views of man (Burhans 283-4). After the war, Hemingway stayed in Paris and focused on fiction writing. Here he met important writers such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Leggett 650).
Fitzgerald was known for his pursuit of an "elusive American Dream" (Bryfonski 233). His most traditional ideas came from the 1920's, which he was the spokesperson for and helped contribute to the...