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Lost Generation

 

Group of U.S. writers who came of age during World War I and established their reputations in the 1920s; more broadly, the entire post – World War I American generation. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein in a remark to Ernest Hemingway. The writers considered themselves "lost" because their inherited values could not operate in the postwar world and they felt spiritually alienated from a country they considered hopelessly provincial and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, and Hart Crane, among others.

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US History Encyclopedia: Lost Generation
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Lost Generation refers to a group of early-twentieth-century American writers, notably Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, and Thomas Wolfe. The writings of these authors were shaped by World War I and self-imposed exile from the American mainstream. Malcolm Cowley, a chronicler of the era, suggested that they shared a distaste for the grandiose patriotic war manifestos, although they differed widely in their means of expressing that distaste. The influence of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, as well as encouragement of editors and publishers of magazines such as Dial, Little Review, transition, and Broom, were significant in the development of their writings.

Bibliography

Cowley, Malcolm. A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation. New York: Viking Press, 1974.

Dolan, Marc. Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-reading of the "Lost Generation." West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1996.

History Dictionary: lost generation
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The young adults of Europe and America during World War I. They were “lost” because after the war many of them were disillusioned with the world in general and unwilling to move into a settled life. Gertrude Stein is usually credited with popularizing the expression.

  • The characters in the book The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, are examples of the lost generation.

  • Literary Glossary: Lost Generation
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    A term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. The term is commonly applied to Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.

    Wikipedia: Lost Generation
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    The "Lost Generation" is a term used to characterize a general motif 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 generation 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 Global financial crisis of 2008–2009.[1][2]. This is partly based on evidence that it can be difficult for those affected to get back into employment when economic activity picks up.

    Origin of the term

    The phrase is attributed to Gertrude Stein[3], 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.[citation needed] In Europe, they are mostly known as the "Generation of 1914", for the year World War I began.[4] In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they were sometimes called the Génération au Feu, the Generation in Flames.[citation needed]

    In Britain the term was originally used for those who died in the war,[5] and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite.[6] 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,[7] composer George Butterworth and physicist Henry Moseley.

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    Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
    US History Encyclopedia. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
    History Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Answers Corporation Literary Glossary. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Lost Generation" Read more