The Auden Generation

This is a study of a literary generation writing in a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. The pace of the time itself, the sense of time passing and an end approaching gave a special quality to the Thirties. The public world pressed insistently on the private world. For those who came of literary age - Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, Graham Greene, Isherwood and Orwell among them - writing became a form of action. In the process a generation discovered itself and found its own expression.

Samuel Hynes was born in Chicago in 1924 and was educated at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University. He has taught at Swarthmore College, Northwestern University. From 1943 to 1946, and again in 1952-3, he served as a pilot in the United States Marine Corps. His books includeThe Pattern of Hardy's Poetry,Edwardian OccasionsandFlights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator.

The Auden Generationis the second volume of Samuel Hynes's trilogy of cultural histories covering the relationship between literature, theatre and public events during the first four decades of the twentieth century. The others -The Edwardian Turn of MindandA War Imagined- are also published by Pimlico.