The Lost Generation

Wed., April 15-May 20, 12-1:30 p.m.

Time: 12-1:30 p.m.

Location: Online

Cost: $70

With Ferdâ Asya, Ph.D., Professor of English

This course explores the dramatic cultural shifts in thinking and living that reshaped America and Western Europe between the end of World War I and the Great Depression. Known as the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, and the era of the Lost Generation, this period redefined values, norms, morals, and manners.

We will immerse ourselves in the culturally and socially vibrant ambiance of 1920s Paris, where expatriate writers gathered in cafés and salons to challenge convention and invent new ways of living and writing.

Through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited and Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, we will examine how their lives and works reflected both the exhilaration and disillusionment of the age.

We will consider how the legacy of this remarkable decade continues to influence literature and culture today.

Ferdâ Asya, Ph.D., Professor of English, has taught at universities worldwide and lived in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Specializing in 19th–20th century American literature with a focus on Edith Wharton, her interests include international literature and American expatriate writing in Europe. She has published widely on authors from Achebe to Stein and edited American Writers in Paris: Then and Now (2025), Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Short Fiction (2021), and American Writers in Europe (2013).

This class will not be recorded.

Class #: 24011

Registration opens for OLLI members on Feb. 3. Non-members may register starting Feb. 9.