Lost Generation

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The Lost Generation also refers to the ex-Red Guards in China. See Red Guards (China).

The term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, Sylvia Beach, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein herself. Hemingway likely popularized the term, quoting Stein ("You are all a lost generation") as epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises. Stein herself attributed the expression to a French mechanic lamenting what the war had done to the country's youth.

More generally, the term is being 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, named after the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they are called the Génération au Feu, the Generation of Fire. Broadly, the term is often used to refer to the younger literary modernists.

William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book Generations list this generation's birth years as 1883 to 1900. Their typical grandparents were the Gilded Generation; their parents were the Progressive Generation and Missionary Generation. Their children were the G.I. Generation and Silent Generation; their typical grandchildren were Baby boomers.

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Traits

The "Lost Generation" were said to be disillusioned by the large number of casualties of the First World War, cynical, disdainful of the Victorian notions of morality and propriety of their elders. Like most attempts to pigeon-hole entire generations, this over-generalization is true for some individuals of the generation and not true of others. It was somewhat common among members of this group to complain that American artistic culture lacked the breadth of European work—leading many members to spend large amounts of time in Europe—and/or that all topics worth treating in a literary work had already been covered. Nevertheless, this selfsame period saw an explosion in American literature and in art, which is now often considered to include some of the greatest literary classics produced by American writers. This generation also produced the first flowering of jazz music, arguably the first distinctly American artform.

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Celebrities

Template:Generations Sample members of the Lost Generation include the following:

Cultural endowments of the Lost Generation include the following:

The Lost Generation produced two Presidents:

They held a plurality in the House of Representatives from 1937 to 1953, a plurality in the Senate from 1943 to 1959, and a majority of the Supreme Court from 1941 to 1967.

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Foreign Peers

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Legacy

At the turn of the 21st century, a fresh cadre of expatriate writers led by such emerging authors as D.A. Blyler (Steffi's Club) and Arthur Phillips (Prague) asserted a new "Lost Generation" among readers, paying homage to their literary peers of 1920s Paris (see External links).

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External links


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