Lost Generation

The term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Significant members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson[?] and Gertrude Stein herself.

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. 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.

The "Lost Generation" were said to be disillusioned by the senseless slaughter 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 fairly 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 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.

Sample members of the Lost Generation include the following:

• 1885 Sinclair Lewis (died 1951)
• 1885 George Patton (died 1945)
• 1888 Irving Berlin (immigrant; died 1989)
• 1890 Dwight D. Eisenhower (died 1969)
• 1891 Earl Warren (died 1974)
• 1891 Nicola Sacco[?] (immigrant; died 1927)
• 1892 Reinhold Niebuhr (died 1971)
• 1892 Mae West (died 1980)
• 1893 Dorothy Parker (died 1967)
• 1894 Norman Rockwell (died 1978)
• 1895 J. Edgar Hoover (died 1972)
• 1895 Babe Ruth (died 1948)
• 1896 George Burns (died 1996)
• 1896 F. Scott Fitzgerald (died 1940)
• 1898 Paul Robeson (died 1976)
• 1899 Humphrey Bogart (died 1957)
• 1899 Al Capone (immigrant; died 1947)
• 1899 Ernest Hemingway (died 1961)
• 1900 Adlai Stevenson (died 1965)

Cultural endowments of the Lost Generation include the following:

• The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
• The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot)
• Babbitt[?] (Sinclair Lewis)
• The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
• Monkey Business[?] (film, The Marx Brothers)
• Creed of an Advertising Man[?] (Bruce Barton[?])
• An American in Paris (George Gershwin)
• Ain't Misbehavin'[?] (Duke Ellington)
• The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett; later a movie)
• The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler)
• The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
• The View from Eighty[?] (Malcolm Cowley)

The Lost Generation produced two Presidents: Harry S Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. 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.

Prominent foreign-born peers of the Lost Generation included Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Charles Chaplin, Charles de Gaulle, and Mao Zedong.

See also generation.