Lost Generation
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Lost Generation refers to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe 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, John Dos Passos, and T. S. Eliot. The coining of the phrase is traditionally attributed to Gertrude Stein<ref>As described by Hemingway in the chapter "'Une Generation Perdue'", of A Moveable Feast, the term was coined by the owner of the Paris garage where Gertrude Stein took her Model T Ford, and was picked up and translated by her.</ref> and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast.
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, named after the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they are called the Génération du 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. [1] [May 2007]
