Lost Generation

For other uses, see Lost Generation (disambiguation).

The "Lost Generation" is a term used to characterize a general lorennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn quife of disillusionment of American literary notables who lived in Europe, most notably Paris, after the First World War. Figures identified with the "Lost Generation" included authors and artists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and Cole Porter.

The term was popularized and often credited to author and poet Gertrude Stein. Stein supposedly heard her French garage owner speak of his young auto mechanics, and their poor repair skills, as "une génération perdue."

The term has more recently been used as a generic shorthand for groups of young people disproportionately affected by economic shocks, often involving lengthy periods of unemployment, such as those affected by the Financial crisis of 2007–2010.. This is partly based on evidence that it can be difficult for those affected to get back into employment when economic activity picks up.

A video by AARP about a "lost generation" has garnered over 10 million views promoting youth empowerment.

Origin of the term

The phrase is attributed to Gertrude Stein, then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast. In the latter he explained "I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes." (A few lines later, recalling the risks and losses of the war, he adds: "I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought 'who is calling who a lost generation?'") Broadly, the term is often used to refer to the younger literary modernists.

Variously, the term is used for the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression, though in the United States it is used for the generation of young people who came of age during and shortly after World War I, alternatively known as the World War I Generation. In Europe, they are mostly known as the "Generation of 1914", for the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they were sometimes called the Génération au Feu, the Generation in Flames.

In Britain the term was originally used for those who died in the war, and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite. Many felt "that 'the flower of youth' and the 'best of the nation' had been destroyed," for example such notable casualties as the poets Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen, composer George Butterworth and physicist Henry Moseley.