Lost Generation

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The "Lost Generation" is a term coined by author and poet Gertrude Stein which characterizes disillusionment, a general motif of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe, some after military service in the First World War. Figures identified with the "Lost Generation" include authors and other artists including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck and Cole Porter.

Origin of the term

The coining of the phrase is sometimes attributed to Gertrude Stein^[1] and was 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 after, 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?")

It also refers to the time period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. More generally, the term is used for the generation of young people coming of age in the United States during and shortly after World War I. For this reason, the generation is sometimes known as the World War I Generation. In Europe, they are most often known as the Generation of 1914, for the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they are sometimes called the Génération du Feu, the Generation of Fire. Broadly, the term is often used to refer to the younger literary modernists.

In Britain the term was originally used for those who died in combat in World War I ,^[2] and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite.^[3] 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, Ford Maddox Ford, and Wilfred Owen.^[4], or physicist Henry Moseley.

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