Lost Generation

Lost Generation

Group of U.S. writers who came of age during World War I and established their reputations in the 1920s; more broadly, the entire post–World War I American generation. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein in a remark to Ernest Hemingway. The writers considered themselves “lost” because their inherited values could not operate in the postwar world and they felt spiritually alienated from a country they considered hopelessly provincial and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, and Hart Crane, among others.

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Lost Generation

intellectuals and aesthetes, rootless and disillusioned, who came to maturity during World War I. [Am. Lit.: Benét, 600]

See : Disillusionment

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Lost Generation

a phrase introduced by the American writer G. Stein, referring to Western European and American writers whose works, published in the 1920’s in the wake of the tragic experience of World War I (1914–18), expressed a profound disillusionment with capitalist civilization. Among the writers of the “lost generation” were E. Hemingway, W. Faulkner, J. Dos Passos, F. S. Fitzgerald, E. M. Remarque, and A. T. Kristensen.

In a broad sense, the lost generation was made up of people who had been through the war. Spiritually traumatized by this experience, they lost their faith in bourgeois virtues and became keenly aware of their alienation from society. The protest of writers of the lost generation is characterized chiefly by moral and ethical fervor. By the 1930’s the theme of the lost generation had lost much of its poignancy. After World War II (1939–45) some of the attitudes of the lost generation were expressed in the work of the “beat generation” (USA), the “angry young men” (Great Britain), and the “generation of returning soldiers” (Federal Republic of Germany).

REFERENCES

Kashkin, I. E. Kheminguei. Moscow, 1966.
Solov’ev, E. “Tsvet tragedii.” Novyi mir, 1968, no.9.
Gorbunov, A. N. Romany F. S. Fitsdzheral’da. Moscow, 1974.
Cowley, M. A Second Flowering. New York, 1937.

E. IU. GENIEVA