Wine and the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris

In the 1920s a generation of American writers washed up in Paris — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and their restless circle — and made the city’s cafés their salon. Wine was woven through all of it: cheap, plentiful and central to the conversation, the writing and the myth of the “Lost Generation.” It is a story of creativity, freedom and glamour — and, underneath, of a real and sometimes ruinous cost. (See also: the whole sweep of wine history.)

Americans in Paris

After the First World War, a wave of young American writers and artists settled in Paris, drawn by its freedom, its cheapness and its creative electricity. They came to be called the Lost Generation — the writers who came of age in the war and found their voice in the disillusioned, searching 1920s. Among them were Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings and Ezra Pound¹.

Escaping Prohibition

Part of the pull was simple thirst. Back home, America was dry: Prohibition banned the sale of alcohol across the United States from 1920 to 1933, while in Paris wine flowed freely and cheaply at every café and bistro. For expatriate Americans, the French capital offered a whole way of living — wine emphatically included — that was illegal at home².

“You are all a lost generation”

The group owes its name to Gertrude Stein, the doyenne of the expatriate scene, whose salon at 27 rue de Fleurus was its unofficial headquarters³. As Hemingway later told it, Stein had picked up the phrase from a French garage owner who dismissed his young mechanics as a génération perdue — a lost generation — and turned the label on Hemingway and his friends⁴.

You are all a lost generation.— Gertrude Stein, in conversation (epigraph to The Sun Also Rises)⁵

The novel that named them

Hemingway made the phrase immortal by placing it as the epigraph to his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, whose hard-drinking, fast-living expatriates — drifting between Paris cafés and Spanish bullfights on a tide of wine and spirits — became the defining portrait of the age. The name stuck to a whole generation because a novel, and a glass, made it stick⁶.

The cafés of Montparnasse

Their world centred on the cafés of Montparnasse — Le Dôme, La Rotonde, the Select and, above all, the Closerie des Lilas — where writers and painters argued, read, fell in and out of favour, and worked. Over carafes of house wine and small coffees, much of the modern literature of the century took shape at the café table⁷.

The Closerie des Lilas was Hemingway’s favourite retreat: quiet enough to write in, and the café he mentions most often in his Paris memoir. It was in these rooms, glass at his elbow, that he drafted The Sun Also Rises itself⁸.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the Dingo Bar

No one captured the era’s wine culture better than Hemingway. In his memoir A Moveable Feast he wrote of wine as something wholly natural — as ordinary and necessary as food, and a plain source of happiness — and lovingly recorded the crisp whites and honest reds that accompanied his meals and his writing⁹. For more, see wine in the workplace.

It was in this world that the two giants met. In late April 1925, at the Dingo Bar in Montparnasse — barely two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published — Hemingway was introduced to F. Scott Fitzgerald, beginning one of literature’s most famous and fraught friendships, much of it conducted over a bottle¹⁰.

The glamour and the cost

There was a darker side to the romance, and it is only honest to name it. For Fitzgerald — the chronicler of champagne-soaked glamour in The Great Gatsby — heavy drinking became a genuine affliction that damaged his health, his work and his marriage to Zelda, and helped cut short both his career and his life¹¹. For more, see wine and Valentine’s Day.

He was not alone; the wine-soaked mythology of the Lost Generation came, for several of its members, at a real and painful price. The café and the carafe gave the age its creativity and its charm — but for some, the same habits proved corrosive.

A generation’s legacy

The image of the writer in a Paris café, notebook open and a glass of wine to hand, has shaped how we picture the creative life ever since. The Lost Generation left a towering body of work — and a lasting romance of wine, words and expatriate Paris that endures a century on, glamour and cost forever intertwined.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Wine and the writer
• Paris and its wine, a decade later
• A history of French wine

References

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Lost Generation. www.britannica.com ↩
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Prohibition (United States history). www.britannica.com ↩
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Gertrude Stein. www.britannica.com ↩
4. Quote Investigator — You Are All a Lost Generation. quoteinvestigator.com ↩
5. Project MUSE — Gertrude Stein and Hemingway’s “Lost Generation”. muse.jhu.edu ↩
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — The Sun Also Rises. www.britannica.com ↩
7. Literary Traveler — The Flavor of Paris: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. www.literarytraveler.com ↩
8. Trafalgar — Retrace the Lost Generation in Paris. www.trafalgar.com ↩
9. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Ernest Hemingway. www.britannica.com ↩
10. The Hemingway Society. www.hemingwaysociety.org ↩
11. Encyclopaedia Britannica — F. Scott Fitzgerald. www.britannica.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
For the wider world of French wine the expatriates fell in love with.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Good on wine in modern society and culture.

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