ABSTRACT This essay tries to make a comparison between the two novels, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which are the representation of the literatures of “the Lost Generation.” By comparing the two novels, this essay will mainly discuss their similarities in the depiction of decadence, solutions, and the arrangement of characters. INTRODUCTION Gertrude Stein, an American author who spent most of her adult life in Paris, once told Ernest Hemingway “You are all a lost generation.” (Ian Ousby, 1981, p.205) Hemingway was enlightened by this comment and made it the epigraph of his first novel, Fiesta (named The Sun Also Rises in America). With the success of this novel, the phrase “the Lost Generation” was accepted by the public as the label of the group of writers who were born at the beginning of 20th century and reached maturity during World War I, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, and etc. Among all the works of “the Lost Generation”, The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby best show the two main themes of that special era, namely the anti-war emotion and the corruption of the “American dream." After World War I, many writers found the war nothing but a political fraud, thus they were often exiled. They became exhausted with wars and confused about the future. Disillusioned with society in general and America in particular, the novelists cultivated a romantic self-absorption. They became precocious experts in tragedy, suffering and anguish. Ernest Hemingway wrote his first novel The Sun Also Rises to express the angst of the post-war generation, known as “the Lost Generation”. The novel tells a story of a couple that have a very strange relationship. Ernest Hemingway showed the aimless lives of the expatriates, and expressed the anti-war emotion in it. However, the nihilism and the suffering were only half the picture. The time after the war also embraced the financial boom and extravagance. People’s mental world changed tremendously. Traditional morality, ideal and religious belief began to collapse. Some young people were seeking for unconventional and unrestrained life according to their own will and instinct. F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of them. He tried to write such life into his finest work The Great Gatsby, which gives a very objective image of the hedonistic world then. It captures both the crazy enjoyment and the underlying sadness that people had, and also criticizes the destruction of the “American dream” following by the vulgar pursuit of material happiness. Although Hemingway and Fitzgerald chose different societies to depict in their novels, The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby have much in common. In spite of telling very different stories, they both depict the decadence in the 1920s and reflect similar problems: disillusion, corruption and failure. 1. Similarities in the Depiction of Decadence When World War I ended in 1918, the young generation of American who had experienced the war became intensely disillusioned as the earlier Victorian social morality valued much less. The boom