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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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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.

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.

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    Wikipedia on Answers.com:

    Lost Generation

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    The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to Gertrude Stein, who was then his mentor and patron.

    In A Moveable Feast, which was published after Hemingway and Stein were both dead and after a literary feud that lasted much of their life, Hemingway reveals that the phrase was actually originated by the garage owner who serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car in a way satisfactory to Stein, the owner shouted at her, "You are all a "génération perdue."[1] Stein, in telling Hemingway the story, added, "That is what you are. That's what you all are...all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."[2] This generation included distinguished artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Waldo Peirce, Alan Seeger, and Erich Maria Remarque.

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    In literature

    Gertrude Stein with Ernest Hemingway's son, Jack Hemingway (nicknamed Bumby) in 1924. Stein is credited with bringing the term "Lost Generation" into use.

    The term originated with Gertrude Stein who, after being unimpressed by the skills of a young car mechanic, asked the garage owner where the young man had been trained. The garage owner told her that while young men were easy to train, it was those in their mid-twenties to thirties, the men who had been through World War I, whom he considered a "lost generation" – une génération perdue.[3]

    The 1926 publication of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises popularized the term, as Hemingway used it as an epigraph. The Sun Also Rises epitomized the post-war expatriate generation.[4] However, Hemingway himself later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever"; he believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.[5]

    In his memoir A Moveable Feast, published after his death, he writes "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?'"

    Other uses

    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. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, well known for their generational theory, define the Lost Generation as the cohorts born from 1883 to 1900, who came of age during World War I and the roaring twenties.[6] In Europe, they are mostly known as the "Generation of 1914," for the year World War I began.[7] 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,[8] and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite.[9] 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,[10] composer George Butterworth and physicist Henry Moseley.

    Notes

    1. ^ Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast, Touchstone, New York: 1996, p. 29
    2. ^ Ibid
    3. ^ Mellow, Charmed Circle, p. 273
    4. ^ Mellow 1992, p. 302
    5. ^ Baker 1972, p. 82
    6. ^ Howe, Neil; Strauss, William (1991). Generations: The History of Americas Future. 1584 to 2069. New York: William Morrow and Company. pp. 247–260. ISBN 0-688-11912-3. 
    7. ^ Wohl, Robert (1979). The generation of 1914. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-34466-2. http://books.google.com/books?id=YLe3e3FDXQkC&lpg=PA1&dq=wohl%201914&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
    8. ^ "The Lost Generation: the myth and the reality", Aftermath - when the boys came home, accessed 6 November 2009.
    9. ^ J. M. Winter, Britain's 'Lost Generation' of the First World War, 1977
    10. ^ BBC Schools Online

    Sources

    • Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-42126-4. 
    • Hemingway, Ernest (1996). A Movable Feast. New York: Touchstone. ISBN 0-684-82499-X. 
    • Mellow, James R. (1992). Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-37777-3. 
    • Mellow, James R. (1991). Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395479827. 

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