¹ For studies of Cain's life and career see Hoopes, Roy, Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982)Google Scholar; Madden, David, James M. Cain (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970)Google Scholar; Skenazy, Paul, James M. Cain: Literature and Life (New York: Ungar, 1989)Google Scholar; and Hoopes, Roy, 60 Years of Journalism by James M. Cain (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Cain's unpublished memoirs are included among his papers at the Library of Congress: James M. Cain Papers, 1901–2004, MS47399, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

² The only full-length account of Al Dubin's life is a biography/memoir written by his daughter, Patricia Dubin McGuire. The many music and film encyclopedia entries on Dubin that have appeared in the last three decades are based almost entirely on her book. McGuire, Patricia Dubin, Lullaby of Broadway (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Lasser, Michael, “Al Dubin,” in Furia, Philip, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Song Lyricists, 1920–1960, Volume 265 (Detroit: Thomas/Gale, 2002): 109–21Google Scholar. Obituaries for Dubin in New York Times, 12 Feb. 1945, 19; and New York Herald Tribune, 12 Feb. 1945, 12.

³ Major works of the American literature of disillusionment after the Great War include Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier's Home” (1925) and A Farewell to Arms (1929); John Dos Passos, One Man's Initiation – 1917 (1920), Three Soldiers (1921), and 1919 (1932); e.e. cummings, The Enormous Room (1922); William March, Company K (1932), and William Faulkner, A Soldier's Pay (1926).

⁴ These European and American writers were certainly not the only, or the last, artists to present the Great War in terms of a generation's loss of innocence. A variety of cultural forms helped to sustain this conception of the war well beyond the literature of the 1920s. Film treatments were most important during the 1930s, including war pictures (All Quiet on the Western Front) and postwar dramas (Heroes for Sale). American audiences – and policy makers – were far less receptive to portrayals of Great War disillusionment during World War II and the Cold War 1950s. But with Vietnam, the subject again resonated strongly, ranging from the film version of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1971) to Paul Fussell's widely influential study of British literature of the era, The Great War and Modern Memory (1976). A more recent example is Pat Barker's “Regeneration Trilogy” of World War I novels (1990s), whose characters include shell-shock victims and the veteran authors Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

⁵ The historian David M. Kennedy provided an important, earlier revision of the theme of disillusionment's legacy in his comprehensive study of the US war experience Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 218–30Google Scholar.

⁶ Gandal, Keith, War Isn't the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)Google Scholar; Gandal, , The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keene, Jennifer, “Hemingway: A Typical Doughboy,” in Paul, Stephen and Trout, Steven, eds., War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway's Early Life and Writings (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2014), 53–71Google Scholar; and Trout, Steven, ed., American Prose Writers of World War I: A Documentary Volume (Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁷ Trout, Steven, On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Budreau, Lisa, Bodies of War: World War I and the Politics of Commemoration in America, 1919–1933 (New York: New York University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Kimberly Limay Licursi, “The Creation of an American Collective Memory of the First World War: 1917–1941,” PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Albany, 2013.

⁸ See especially James, Pearl, The New Death: American Modernism and World War I (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Hutchinson, Hazel, The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Vincent, Jonathan, Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890–1964 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

⁹ Dos Passos was also inducted into the US Army in September 1918 after serving as a volunteer ambulance driver in France and Italy. He spent the last weeks of the war stateside, where he encountered much of the material for the novel Three Soldiers (1921). Carr, Virginia Spencer, Dos Passos: A Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 117–64Google Scholar. Rood, Karen, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume IV, American Writers in Paris, 1920–1939 (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1980)Google Scholar; and Martine, James, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume IX, American Novelists, 1910–1945 (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1981)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Despite a rich literature on the American home-front experience, remarkably little attention has been given to the comparative impact of the war on the United States and the other major belligerents. See, for example, Schaffer, Ronald, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and O'Leary, Cecilia, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ The phrase “Lost Generation” first appeared in print as an epigraph in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926). According to Hemingway, Gertrude Stein used the term to describe the generation that came of age during the war, which she felt was left scarred and directionless as a result. The phrase has since become more specifically associated with the expatriate community of American modernists in Paris during the 1920s. “Lost Generation” is used in this article as a shorthand means of referring, à la Stein, to the cohort of American veteran authors like Hemingway who expressed the theme of disillusionment in their work after the war. I do not distinguish between the writers who became expatriates and those who did not.

¹² Three very different approaches to interpreting American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have helped in the framing of this article. Levine, Lawrence, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, for identifying the coming divide; May, Henry F., The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (New York: Knopf, 1959)Google Scholar, for describing the many fissures and “little” rebellions that pre-dated the war; and Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso Press, 1997)Google Scholar, for offering an explicitly working-class explanation of Depression-era mass culture.

¹³ McGuire, Lullaby of Broadway, 72.

¹⁴ Letter from Cain to Edmund Wilson, 29 June 1940, Part B: General Correspondence, Box 62, Cain Papers; Hoopes, Cain, 3–37; and Madden, James M. Cain, 24–30.

¹⁵ Hoopes, Cain, 38–59; and Madden, 30–32.

¹⁶ McGuire, 14–33; Philadelphia Evening Ledger, 16 Oct. 1919, 3; New York Sun, 11 Feb. 1912, 4:10; and Collier's, 27 July 1935, 17.

¹⁷ McGuire, 35–64; New York Clipper, 30 Sept. 1916, 5; Al Dubin, Selective Service Registration Card, dated 5 June 1917, Precinct 36, New York, New York; New York Times, 31 July 1917, 10; and Al Dubin, Military Discharge Record (Washington, DC, Adjutant General's Office, 20 June 1921).

¹⁸ For accounts of the World War I draft see Chambers, John Whiteclay III, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York: Free Press, 1987), 125–237Google Scholar; and Kriedberg, Marvin, History of Military Mobilization in the United States Army, 1775–1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1955), 241–80Google Scholar.

¹⁹ James M. Cain, Selective Service Registration Card, dated 5 June 1917, Kent, Maryland; Hoopes, Cain, 54–62; and Madden, 30–32

²⁰ Hoopes, Cain, 60–79; Cain, James M. and Malcolm, Gilbert, 79th Division Headquarters Troop: A Record (n.p., 1919)Google Scholar; 79th Division Association, History of the 79th Division, A.E.F. during the World War, 1917–1919 (Lancaster, PA: Steinman and Steinman, 1922), 17–37Google Scholar; Hoopes, Cain, 60–70; Madden, 32–33.

²¹ Quoted in Hoopes, Cain, 61.

²² 79th Division Association, History of the 79th Division, 379–428; Hallas, James H., Squandered Victory: The American First Army at St. Mihiel (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995)Google Scholar; Braim, Paul F., Test of Battle: The American Expeditionary Forces in the Meuse–Argonne Campaign (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Kennedy, Over Here, 204; Sterba, Christopher M., Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 177–81Google Scholar.

²³ Cain and Malcolm, 19. As discussed below, Cain wrote two short stories in 1929, “The Taking of Montfaucon” and “It Breathed,” which describe his activities as a messenger and observer on the Western Front. Hoopes, Cain, 60–70.

²⁴ Baker, Carlos, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 52–77Google Scholar; Mellow, James R., Ernest Hemingway: A Life without Consequences (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing, 1994), 58–65Google Scholar.

²⁵ Gandal, Gun and the Pen; and Keene, “Hemingway: A Typical Doughboy.”

²⁶ Davis, David A., World War I and Southern Modernism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018), 81–116Google Scholar; Williams, Chad L., Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)Google Scholar

²⁷ McGuire, Lullaby of Broadway, 68. For detailed discussions of the conflicted views of American Jews during the war era see Sterba.

²⁸ Dubin, Al, McCormack, Rennie, and McConnell, G. B., “Your Country Needs You Now” (New York: M. Witmark & Sons, 1917)Google Scholar.

²⁹ New York Clipper, 6 June 1917, 15.

³⁰ Al Dubin and James Monaco, “Dream of a Soldier Boy” (New York: M. Witmark & Sons, 1917); and New York Clipper, 1 Aug. 1917, 18.

³¹ As will be seen, Dubin had a hardnosed attitude toward writing songs for the popular market, and most likely in 1917 wanted simply to come up with a hit that would rival George M. Cohan's. But Dubin was also sensitive and very sentimental in his tastes and might well have been caught up in the spirit of the times. McGuire; and Thomas, Tony, The Hollywood Musical: The Saga of Songwriter Harry Warren (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1987), 113Google Scholar.

³² Adler, Julius, History of the Seventy-Seventh Division, August 25, 1917–November 11, 1918 (New York: W. H. Crawford Co. Printers, 1919), 7–18Google Scholar; Camp, Charles, History of the 305th Field Artillery (Garden City, NY: Country Life Press, 1919), 3–70; and McGuire, 66–69Google Scholar.

³³ An officer in Dubin's artillery regiment wrote a gripping account of the unit's experiences in France, including descriptions of how several members were wounded or killed by enemy shrapnel and mustard gas. Camp; and McGuire, 70–74.

³⁴ Dubin quoted in McGuire, 71–72, 74. According to his official military record, Dubin served in the 305th Field Artillery from April 1918 to August 1919, when he was honorably discharged. In the fall of 1918, he was chosen to serve in the 77th Division's entertainment troupe (see discussion of Argonne Players below), after seing action in the Baccarat, Vesle, and Aisne sectors. At the time of his death, some newspapers inaccurately reported that Dubin served only in the entertainment unit, an error that has been repeated in subsequent encyclopedia entries on his life. Dubin, Military Discharge Record; New York Herald Tribune, 12 Feb. 1945, 12; and Michael Lasser, “Al Dubin.”

³⁵ Dubin, Al, The Art of Song Writing (New York: Mills Music, 1928), 45–46Google Scholar.

³⁶ A very small percentage of the peacetime AEF, mainly its officers, was able to travel and attend classes at both European and makeshift American universities. These activities have received much more scholarly attention than the boredom and homesickness experienced by the vast majority of enlisted men. See Alfred E. Cornebise, Soldier–Scholar: Higher Education in the AEF, 1917–1919 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997).

³⁷ Lorraine Cross, 1, 1–14 (Feb.–May 1919); 79th Division Association, History of the 79th Division, 503–7.

³⁸ Hoopes, Cain, 76, 77.

³⁹ This description of the Lorraine Cross is derived from the issues when Cain served as editor (nos. 4–14); Hoopes, Cain, 72–79. Cain's letter from Gen. Kuhn and his framed copy of the last issue of the Lorraine Cross were advertised for sale by an antiquarian book dealer, at www.royalbooks.com/pages/books/109915/james-m-cain/archive-of-material-relating-to-the-lorraine-cross, accessed 14 May 2019.

⁴⁰ New York Times, 8 June 1919, 56.

⁴¹ Cain and Malcolm, 79th Division Headquarters Troop, 5.

⁴² New York Times, 5 Jan. 1919, 70; Woollcott, Alexander, The Command Is Forward (New York: Century Co., 1919), 150–55Google Scholar; and New York Clipper, 13 Nov. 1918, 13.

⁴³ Theatre Magazine, 30 (Aug. 1919), 84; and Evans, James W., Entertaining the Army: The American Stage and Lyceum in the World War (New York: Association Press, 1921)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Dubin and Fred Rath, “They Didn't Think We'd Do It, But We Did” (New York: 77th Division Association, 1920).

⁴⁵ McGuire, Lullaby of Broadway, 74. Private Buck McCollum, a fellow member of the 77th Division and a survivor of the famous “Lost Battalion,” sent a copy of his book History and Rhymes of the Lost Battalion to Dubin in 1933. McCollum inscribed it, “To Doctor ‘Al’ Dubin, Ace Mixologist A.E.F. whose Special Concoctions of timely SONGS put sunshine in rainy old France back in the days of 1917–18 when we ‘didn't think we'd do it but we did.’ From one who got a real ‘kick’ out of your many songs.” Email correspondence with Janet M. Rasch, a Dubin family relative, 15 Aug. 2007.

⁴⁶ Steel, Ronald, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 197–210Google Scholar; Hoopes, 60 Years of Journalism, 11–101; Kunkel, Thomas, Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995), 194–96, 201–2Google Scholar; Hoopes, Cain, 83–214; Madden, James M. Cain, 33–42.

⁴⁷ Cain's reverence for Mencken, for example, existed well before the two men met. Reading a Mencken editorial for the first time in 1920, Cain snapped up and devoured as many of the “sage's” books and issues of the Smart Set he could find. Both men shared a profound, yet humorous, cynicism toward American life and a love for what Mencken famously called “the American language.” For Lippmann, Cain maintained the deepest respect. The author of Public Opinion allowed Cain near total freedom in selecting subjects and expressing his own views, while at the same time demanding the highest standards imaginable for the quality (grammatical and otherwise) of his writing. In stark contrast, Cain claimed he did not learn anything stylistically from Harold Ross and deplored the New Yorker’s heavy-handed editing process. Nonetheless, Ross's erratic leadership discovered many important young writers, and Cain was in the thick of the magazine's vibrant atmosphere of selection and publication. Steel, Walter Lippmann, 202–3, 269–82; Kunkel, 196, 201–2, 265; Hoopes, Cain, 88–214; Madden, 34–42.

⁴⁸ Hoopes, Cain, 127–129, 132–33, 139–51.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 151. It is important to acknowledge another combat veteran, William March, whose war novel of disillusionment, Company K (1933), was also very successful.

⁵⁰ Cain, James M., “The Taking of Montfaucon,” American Mercury, 27 (June 1929), 136–43Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Ibid., 143.

⁵² Trout, On the Battlefield of Memory, 6–10, 72–74.

⁵³ Ibid., 137, 141; Hoopes, Cain, 66–67; and Madden, David, Cain's Craft (Methuen, NJ: 1985), 128Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ James M. Cain, “It Breathed,” New York World, 17 Nov. 1929, 28.

⁵⁵ Ibid. The novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien tells a very similar story, of an isolated company on patrol that repeatedly hears music and the sounds of a cocktail party going on in the jungle. O'Brien, Tim, The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1990), 71–77Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Cain, “It Breathed.”

⁵⁷ Cain, James M., Our Government (New York: Knopf, 1930)Google Scholar; Mencken, H. L., The Diary of H. L. Mencken (New York: Knopf, 1989), 30–31Google Scholar; Kunkel, Genius in Disguise, 194–95; and Hoopes, Cain, 126–58, 186, 199–214.

⁵⁸ For historical surveys of Tin Pan Alley see Tawa, Nicholas, The Way to Tin Pan Alley: American Popular Song, 1866–1910 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Spring, Katherine, Saying It with Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ McGuire, Lullaby of Broadway, 95.

⁶⁰ Spring, 15–65; and New York Clipper, 16 Sept. 1916, 17.

⁶¹ Dubin, Art of Song Writing.

⁶² Ibid., 7. Dubin made very similar comments in 1933 after successfully making the transition to Hollywood songwriting. “Since the movie audience is a cross section of the country, we avoid the over sophisticated and aim for the home folks. A very small percentage of people like smart stuff anyway, but almost everybody, including the big city folks, like human stuff.” Doron Antrim, “The New Song Technique,” The Metronome, June 1933, 19.

⁶³ Dubin, Art of Song Writing, 7–10.

⁶⁴ Al Dubin, Irving Mills, Jimmie McHugh, and Irwin Dash, “What Has Become of Hinky Dinky Parlay Voo?” (New York, Jack Mills Music, 1924); and Hischak, Thomas, ed., The Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 140Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Kinder, John, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 151–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Trout, On the Battlefield of Memory, 84–85.

⁶⁶ Al Dubin and Jimmy McHugh, “My Dream of the Big Parade” (New York: Mills Music, 1926); and Durgnat, Raymond and Simmon, Scott, King Vidor, American (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 59–73Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Film historian David Thomson has described how the movie itself was very sentimental. Thomson, David, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), 114Google Scholar. For surveys of American World War I films see Kimberly Limay Licursi, Remembering World War I in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 147–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Debauche, Leslie Midkiff, Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Passos, John Dos, 1919 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1961; first published 1932), 506–11Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Al Dubin and J. Russel Robinson, “Memories of France” (New York: Mills Music, 1928).

⁷⁰ New York Clipper, 21 Dec. 1923, 25; and McGuire, Lullaby of Broadway, 88–89.

⁷¹ Hoopes, Cain, 217–43; and Madden, James M. Cain, 42–46.

⁷² Cain, James M., “Camera Obscura,” in American Mercury, 30 (Oct. 1933), 138–46Google Scholar.

⁷³ Cain, “Camera Obscura,” 144; and Madden, Cain's Craft, 27–36.

⁷⁴ Cain, “Camera Obscura,” 146.

⁷⁵ Madden, James M. Cain, 115.

⁷⁶ For discussion of Cain and the development of the noir genre see Marling, William, The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Katherine Spring discusses Dubin's first Hollywood contract and includes it as an appendix in Saying It with Songs, 62–62, 158–60. Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 Jan. 1935, 12; Kanter, Kenneth Aaron, The Jews on Tin Pan Alley: The Jewish Contribution to American Popular Music, 1830–1940 (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982), 58Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Though expressing himself in a joking manner, Dubin did vent to a reporter some of his frustration with the duo's extreme workload: “We'll be working on two pictures at once, galloping back and forth between sets and trying to drag imperishable melodies and lyrics out of two poor brains which would be better off interred.” Kyle Crichton, “Duet,” Collier's, 27 July 1935, 39; and Washington Post, 15 Sept. 1935, ST3.

⁷⁹ “It's mainly a matter of writing music that will photograph,” Dubin explained to a reporter just after the premiere of his first Hollywood hit, The Gold Diggers of 1933. “A picture song must go somewhere, it must fit into the action of the story and help it along. Just taking time out for a song now and then in a picture is passé.” Here Dubin envisioned the new form of story-based musical that would ultimately come to dominate Broadway from the late 1940s to the present. Antrim, “New Song Technique,” 19.

⁸⁰ Al Dubin and Harry Warren, “Remember My Forgotten Man” (New York: Remick Music, 1933).

⁸¹ Al Dubin and Harry Warren, “For a Buck and a Quarter a Day” (New York: M. Witmark & Sons, 1936); Dubin and Warren, “Don't Give Up the Ship” (New York: Remick Music, 1935); and Dubin and Warren, “The Song of the Marines” (New York: Remick Music, 1937).

⁸² Furia, Philip, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 240Google Scholar.

⁸³ Cain, James M., The Postman Always Rings Twice (New York: Vintage, 1992; first published 1934), 3Google Scholar; and Cain, , Double Indemnity (New York: Vintage, 1992; first published 1936), 4Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ Two of Cain's Depression-era works begin in the same manner, but with different subjects. Serenade opens with the narrator John Howard Sharp analyzing a Mexican woman's appearance. In “Money and the Woman,” Dave Bennett quickly figures out the secret of a bank branch's success. Cain, James M., Serenade (New York: Vintage, 1978; first published 1937)Google Scholar; and Cain, , “Money and the Woman,” in Hoopes, Roy, ed., The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981)Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ Dubin, Al and Warren, Harry, “She's a Latin from Manhattan” (New York: M. Witmark & Sons, 1935)Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ Madden, James M. Cain, 50–59. Cain led an important effort to organize writers in the 1940s. See Fine, David, James M. Cain and the American Authors Authority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ Shipton, Alyn, I Feel a Song Coming On: The Life of Jimmy McHugh (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 44–46, 53, 155Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ McGuire, Lullaby of Broadway, 147.

⁸⁹ Shipton, 45–46, 53, 155; and McGuire, Lullaby of Broadway, 137–39.