Virgil Thompson once described his writings as "sassy but classy"--three words that epitomize our memory of his generation. As America's first (and, many say, best) film stars, the Lost Generation left behind a celluloid image of their versatile personality: from physicality (Mae West, Jimmy Cagney), mischief (the Marx Brothers), and evil (Edward G. Robinson, Boris Karloff) to savoir-faire (Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford), adventure (Douglas Fairbanks), and keen survivalism (Humphrey Bogart).67
As the last generation to come of age without electronic media, the Lost stand as America's most gifted cadre of wordsmiths: They won five of America's nine Nobel Prizes for Literature and produced our culture's most memorable song lyrics (Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein). Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington introduced improvisational jazz, America's first naughty-sounding music. These are lasting gifts from a generation for whom, in Dorothy Parker's words,"art is a form of catharsis," an instinctive response to a whirlwind existence.68
In their entertainment was a no-nonsense lesson about how the individual can maintain his sanity in a harsh and unjust world. "Living is struggle," wrote Thornton Wilder in The Skin of Our Teeth. "Every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for--whether it's a field, a home, or a country." Paul Tillich explained in his old age: "Our generation has seen the horrors latent in man's being rise to the surface and erupt."69
With little philosophizing, the Lost did history's dirty work: attacking Belleau Wood, mapping D-Day, dropping A-bombs, and containing Stalinism. Whatever they did, they half expected history to someday blame them. In some cases, history has: for Earl Warren's internment of Japanese-Americans, for example, or "Dixiecrat" foot-dragging on civil rights. Yet, mostly, the Lost showed unthanked kindness to other generations. After fighting in two world wars and bearing the brunt of the Great Depression, the peers of Truman and Eisenhower accepted, without complaint, 91 percent marginal tax rates to balance the budget, liquidate war debt, finance the Marshall Plan, and pay out generous G.I. benefits. They demonstrated (as Bruce Barton put it) that "a man may be down but he is never out."70
When it was up to them, they did indeed "play the sap" for their elders and juniors. Such sacrifices made possible an era their children and grandchildren now nostalgically recall as the "American High." Yet the Lost Generation taught us more than self-effacing goodwill. From George Patton leading Greatest G.I.s in the Battle of the Bulge to George Burns tutoring Generation X in 18 Again!, they showed us something about what they liked to call "guts."71
So too did they remind us how to have a good time by being just a little "bad." As Malcolm Cowley put it: "Did other generations ever laugh so hard together, drink and dance so hard, or do crazier things just for the hell of it?"72