More Peace Corps history:

     For nearly eighty years, countless travelers, students, and aspiring young writers, yearning to experience their own version of a bohemian and creative existence in the City of Light, have relied on his descriptions to gain a sense of what life was like in Paris at that time.
     Other literary artists who were part of the Lost Generation include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, John Peale Bishop, Kay Boyle, Paul Bowles, and e.e. cummings.
     These writers were encouraged by a fabled American establishment in Paris that served an important role, an English-language bookstore — Shakespeare & Co.— founded and run by Sylvia Beach. The store’s international fame ballooned largely on its one and only publishing venture, James Joyce’s Ulysses, but it was more, much more than just a place to buy books.
     Shakespeare & Company became an information bureau, a forwarding address for American writers, and a lending library where the young Hemingway was an almost daily visitor. In A Moveable Feast, he wrote, “On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living.”
     So, how does one make a connection — a literary bridge — between the Lost Generation of Paris in the 1920s and over five hundred Peace Corps writers who have written vividly about life in more than 130 countries during the past forty years?

Peace Corps writers emulate writers from the Lost Generation
Peace Corps writers are like their predecessors in four ways, I believe.

1) Both groups wrote about, and explained to an American audience, the world of an expatriate. Hemingway wrote of Paris and Spain while Mark Brazaitis writes of Guatemala; Hemingway wrote of big game hunting in East Africa and Norm Rush writes of white racists in Southern Africa; Fitzgerald wrote of wealthy, bored Americans on the French Riviera and Simone Zelitch writes of survivors of the Holocaust leaving Hungary for Haifa. Other Peace Corps writers regularly find equally rewarding subject matter.
     Paul Theroux writes of Indians in Kenya in his first novel set in Africa; Richard Wiley about Korea and Koreans; P. F. Kluge about islands in the sun in the Pacific; and Mark Jacobs, who was a Volunteer in Paraguay and a foreign service officer in his Peace Corps country as well as Turkey and Spain, has written about these places, and more.

2) Both groups include award-winning writers. A partial list of Peace Corps awardees includes:

• Bob Schacochis, winner of the American Book Award in 1985;
• Richard Wiley, winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1986;
• Kathleen Coskran, winner of the Minnesota Voices Prize in 1987;
• Shay Youngblood, winner of both the Pushcart Prize for fiction and a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award;
• Melanie Sumner, winner of the Whiting Award in 1995;
• Marnie Mueller, winner of the 1995 American Book Award;
• Norm Rush, winner of the National Book Award in 1991;
• Ann Neelon, winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry in 1995;
• Mark Brazaitis, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award;
• Peter Chilson, winner of the 1999 Associated Writing Program;