page_title: Lost Generation
section_title: In literature
hierarchical_section_title: Lost Generation / In literature
caption_attribution_description: English: Image of Gertrude Stein and Jack Hemingway in Paris, 1924.
context_page_description: The Lost Generation was the social generational cohort that came of age during World War I. "Lost" in this context refers to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early postwar period. The term is also particularly used to refer to a group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term, and it was subsequently popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: "You are all a lost generation".
  In a more general sense, the Lost Generation is considered to be made up of individuals born between 1883 and 1900. The last surviving person known to have been born in the 19th century died in 2018.
context_section_description: In his memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), published after Hemingway's and Stein's deaths, Hemingway writes that Stein heard the phrase from a French garage owner who serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car quickly enough, the garage owner shouted at the young man, "You are all a "génération perdue." While telling Hemingway the story, Stein added: "That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation." Hemingway thus credits the phrase to Stein, who was then his mentor and patron.
  The 1926 publication of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises popularized the term; the novel serves to epitomize the post-war expatriate generation. However, Hemingway later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever." Hemingway believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.
  Consistent with this ambivalence, Hemingway employs "Lost Generation" as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes, "I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes." A few lines later, 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?'"
caption: Gertrude Stein with Ernest Hemingway's son, Jack in 1924. Stein is credited with bringing the term "Lost Generation" into use.
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