Lost Generation, a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary reputations in the 1920s.
The term is also used more generally to refer to the post-World War Igeneration.
The generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienation from a United States that, basking under Pres. Warren G. Harding’s “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren.
The term embraces Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, EE Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the 1920s.
Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though Hemingway made it widely known.
According to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964), she had heard it used by a garage owner in France, who dismissively referred to the younger generation as a “génération perdue.”
Famed Author Ernest Hemingway Experienced World War II From the Caribbean to D-day’s Normandy
In conversation with Hemingway, she turned that label on him and declared, “You are all a lost generation.”
He used her remark as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris.
