Lost Generation

From Unawiki

• Gertrude Stein used the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway, supposedly quoting a garage mechanic saying to her 'You are all a lost generation', which Hemingway later used as the epigraph to his first novel "The Sun also Rises".
• The term is used to describe the generation of writers returning from WWI, which to them was a shocking experience leading them to produce a kind of art influenced by their experiences at the front.
• The phrase signifies a disillusioned post-war generation characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress and a mood of futility and despair leading to hedonism. The mood is described by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise" when he writes of a generation that found "all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken".
• L.G. usually refers specifically to the American expatriate writers associated with 1920s Paris, especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to a lesser extent T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and also John Dos Passos and William Faulkner.
• Their texts are highly ambivalent as they are not only marked by the shocking war experience, but depict a gradually emerging thirst for life.