A second, related response on the part of American writers involved leaving the country altogether, and many — best-selling novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and Modernist poet Ezra Pound, among others — did just that. They joined disaffected English- and Irishmen like Ford Maddox Ford and James Joyce in Paris, in a social and artistic circle that formed around the writer Gertrude Stein, herself an American expatriate. Stein is responsible for one of the epigraphs that introduce The Sun Also Rises ("You are all a lost generation") and it was she who served as a creative writing teacher to Ernest Hemingway, who left the States in 1921.
Hemingway himself had fought, and was wounded, in the Great War, and as his short story "Soldier's Home" illustrates, the writer-to-be felt profoundly alienated upon his return to the U.S. He moved to Paris with his first wife, Hadley, and in addition to making the acquaintance of Stein and her cohorts, he befriended many others (Hemingway was famously gregarious as well as remarkably handsome) from different countries and social classes, all of whom the war had affected profoundly. While employed as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway traveled around Europe, worked at improving his storytelling skills, and socialized tirelessly with fellow veterans and others in Paris and elsewhere. It is these experiences that provided him with the then-unique and forever-unforgettable milieu of The Sun Also Rises: the so-called Lost Generation and their exploits in the cafés and nightclubs of Paris, as well as on fishing trips and at the bullfights in Spain.
