ABSTRACT
Even before World War II was over, everyone was speculating about the character of the new literary generation. The speculation continues—with publishers positively prospecting for the new Hemingway, the new Scott Fitzgerald, the new William Faulkner, and with any number of alert critics ready to pounce upon whatever new trends are in the making to turn them into literary history. John Aldridge, in After the Lost Generation, his study of the new novelists, tells how he and his literary friends thought they were going to participate in a brilliant postwar period of revolt and innovation, but came to realize soon after the war was over that the new age had not arrived and was not going to. Connected with the question of the new generation's character is the question of whether fiction is losing its old pre-eminence.
