The 1920s are often referred to as the Roaring Twenties. It is commonly described as the golden age, the turbulent and wild time (Meredith 51). Contrary to this popular belief, authors T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemmingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald described this time period differently. Eliot's poem The Waste Land vividly describes the state the world was in after the First World War. Eliot examines how the land has been left desolate and how people act and live. Both the novels The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises exemplify the ideas and concepts described by Eliot. The characters in these works represent the solipsism, boredom, lack of values ​​and conditions present in The Waste Land. Ezra Pound wrote: “Pound's greatest service to Hemingway may have been to direct him to the poetry of Eliot just as The Waste Land made Eliot the dominant poet of literary modernism” (Flora 2012). Eliot's writing greatly influenced many writers of his and subsequent periods. The beginning of The Waste Land begins by describing a scenario, “April is the cruelest month” (Eliot 5), which exemplifies the change of season and how it exposes all the imperfections that the snow has shielded. Dead trees and unpleasant places are exposed. This is true not only for the physical environment, but also spiritually. People buried their thoughts and feelings just as the snow did the unpleasant landscape. People were ignorant of the condition of their atmosphere and revealed no emotion or effort to change it. People can become so removed from their environment that they become indifferent to what is happening around them. Instead of working to put the shattered remains back together, they instead retreated from society and their emotions. They don't show feelings, thoughts or p...... middle of paper ...... but change is possible. The most important part of poetry is that even in the darkest moments you can emerge and move forward. At the end of The Sun Also Rises, Brett states that she and Jake would have fun together, Jake replies, "Isn't it nice to think so?" (Hemingway 251). This means that Jake was able to grow up and begin to understand values. Jake proved that people can evolve and that there is hope for everyone. At the end of The Great Gatsby a similar situation occurs. Nick comes to the conclusion that he can choose his destiny and does not have to be like the careless people around him. The novel ends with: "So we row on, boats against the current, carried back ceaselessly into the past." (Fitzgerald). Each work speaks of a journey that leads to a common consensus, that there is still hope.