Lost Generation
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The 'Lost Generation' is a phrase made popular by American author Ernest Hemingway in his first published novel The Sun Also Rises.[1] Often it is used to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe, some after military service in the First World War. Figures identified with the "Lost Generation" include authors and poets Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, and John Dos Passos.
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[edit] Origin of the term
The coining of the phrase is sometimes attributed to Gertrude Stein[2] and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast. In the latter, he explained, "I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes." (A few lines after, 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?")
It also refers to the time period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. 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, for the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they are sometimes called the Génération du Feu, the Generation of Fire. Broadly, the term is often used to refer to the younger literary modernists.
[edit] Traits
The "Lost Generation" was said to be disillusioned by the large number of casualties of the First World War, cynical, disdainful of the notions of morality and propriety held by their elders, and ambivalent about 19th-Century gender ideals. Like most attempts to stereotype entire generations, this generalization may have been true for some individuals and not for others. Generally speaking, the term refers specifically to the expatriates/bohemians/artists of that particular time/location, and thus is generally used only to describe a specific (if socially elite) group of people within their larger generation.
It was somewhat popular among certain privileged people of this generation to spend large amounts of time in Europe, to complain that all topics worth treating in a literary work had already been covered, and to argue that American artistic culture lacked the sophistication of Europe. This "generation" was also involved with the beginning of jazz.
[edit] Popular culture
- The 1988 film The Moderns is set in 1926 Paris during the period of the Lost Generation.
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, covers extensively the theme of the lost generation from the perspective of a German soldier who fought and died in the World War I.
- The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, looks at the time period through the eyes of an American pilot psychologically damaged by World War I.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Hemingway Ernest. The sun also rises, 13.
- ^ 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.
