No aspect of life in the Twenties has been more commented upon and sensationally romanticized than the so-called Revolt of the Younger Generation. The slightest mention of the decade brings nostalgic recollections to the middle-aged and curious questionings by the young: memories of the deliciously illicit thrill of the first visit to a speakeasy , of the brave denunciation of Puritan morality, and of the fashionable experimentations in amour in the parked sedan on a country road; questions about the naughty, jazzy parties, the flask-toting "sheik," and the moral and stylistic vagaries of the "flapper" and the "drug-store cowboy." "Were young people really so wild?" present-day students ask their parents and teachers. "Was there really a Younger Generation problem?" The answers to such inquiries must of necessity be "yes" and "no" —"Yes" because the business of growing up is always accompanied by a Younger Generation Problem; "no" because what seemed so wild, irresponsible, and immoral in social behavior at the time can now be seen in perspective as being something considerably less sensational than the degeneration of our jazzmad youth. ... 11 For actually the "lost generation" was never lost. It was shocked, uprooted for a time, bitter, critical, rebellious, iconoclastic, experimental, often absurd, more often misdirected—but never "lost." A decade that produced, in addition to the writers listed above, such figures as Eugene O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzserald, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Benét, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, and innumerable others could never be written off as sterile, even by itself in a moment of self-pity. The intellectuals of the Twenties, the "sad young men," as F. Scot Fitzgerald called them, cursed their luck but didn't die; escaped but voluntarily returned; flayed the Babbitts but loved their country, and in so doing gave the nation the liveliest, freshest, most stimulating writing in its literary experience.