- Date:
- 1920 - 1936
- Areas Of Involvement:
- American literature
Lost Generation
Which writers were part of the Lost Generation?
How did the Lost Generation get its name?
Why was the Lost Generation considered lost?
In literature, the Lost Generation is the group of American writers who came of age during World War I (1914–18) and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. They were never a literary school, as in a group of writers who adopted a particular aesthetic or developed a manifesto. Instead, they shared a worldview shaped by the horrors of the “war to end all wars” and a disillusionment with the society that had allowed it. This perspective invariably informed their writings. Lost Generation writers produced such seminal early 20th-century works as The Great Gatsby (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), The Bridge (1930), and Nightwood (1936).
How the Lost Generation became “lost”
Avant-garde American writer Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though her countryman and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway made it widely known. According to Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), she had heard it used by a garage owner in France, who dismissively referred to the younger generation as a “génération perdue.” In conversation with Hemingway, she turned that label on him and declared, “You are all a lost generation.” He used her remark as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris.
The generation was indeed “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienation from a United States that, basking under Pres. Warren G. Harding’s “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren.
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The term Lost Generation is also used more generally to refer to the post-World War I generation: Americans born between 1883 and 1900. Learn about other American generations.
Although the Roaring Twenties was in full swing in the United States, so was Prohibition (1920–33). In Paris, Lost Generation writers encountered a cosmopolitan nightlife, a lower cost of living, and sexual freedom. (Unlike in the United States, homosexuality was legal in France.) The city’s famed bohemianism nurtured creativity and attracted many of the brightest stars and boldest experimenters in art, music, dance, and literature. The Lost Generation fraternized with such avant-garde artists as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró and other expatriates, including James Joyce, Man Ray, Josephine Baker, and Cole Porter. Stein and her lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas, hosted a salon that drew many of these personalities and helped forge important creative bonds.
Members of the Lost Generation
Along with Hemingway, the term Lost Generation embraces F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, Janet Flanner, John Peale Bishop, and many other writers who made Paris the center of their literary activities in the 1920s. It also includes the expatriate publishers and editors who championed their work—such as Sylvia Beach, Eugene and Maria Jolas, and Ford Madox Ford (a significant author in his own right)—and the wealthy Americans abroad who became their patrons, such as Gerald and Sara Murphy.
Other writers associated with the Lost Generation are Sherwood Anderson, whose work profoundly influenced Hemingway and who advised the younger writer to move to Paris instead of Milan; T.S. Eliot, who had studied in Paris in the 1910s and later based himself in London and became a British citizen; H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who visited Europe in 1911 and became a full-time expatriate; Edna St. Vincent Millay, who spent two years in Europe as a Vanity Fair correspondent; and Katherine Anne Porter, whose expatriate experience was centered in Mexico instead of Europe.
Self-destructiveness was a prominent theme in many works by the Lost Generation and a matter of art imitating life. Many of the era’s writers had affairs with each other, feuded with each other, and made themselves notorious. While in Paris, Crane got into a brawl involving several waiters and two policemen at a café, and he was arrested and ordered to pay a fine. Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, became the wild and carefree “prince and princess” of the Lost Generation and the equally wild and carefree Jazz Age.
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Hemingway saluted his generation’s social abandon in a bit of dialogue uttered by his narrator in The Sun Also Rises: “Everybody behaves badly.…Give them the proper chance.” In 1956 Dorothy Parker, who fraternized with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Murphys, told The Paris Review,
Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, “You’re all a lost generation.” That got around to certain people and we all said, “Whee! We’re lost.” Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility.
Themes, works, and relationship to other literary movements
Several writers of the Lost Generation, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, MacLeish, and Cummings, served in the military or in other capacities during the war. So did a number of European writers whose work shared affinities with their American counterparts. These include Erich Maria Remarque, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen (who was killed in action a week before the war ended). Among the notable works they produced that feature war-related themes or reminiscences are:
- Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry collections The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918)
- Wilfred Owen’s poems “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (1917), “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917), and “Strange Meeting” (1918)
- John Dos Passos’s novels Three Soldiers (1921) and 1919 (1932)
- E.E. Cummings’s autobiographical novel The Enormous Room (1922)
- Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home” (1925) and novel A Farewell to Arms (1929)
- Archibald MacLeish’s poetry collection Streets in the Moon (1926) and verse play Air Raid (1938)
- Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
- Robert Graves’s memoir Good-Bye to All That (1929)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night (1934) and essay “The Crack-Up” (1936)
The heyday of the Lost Generation overlapped with those of several other significant literary movements and scenes of the early 20th century, especially Modernism, Imagism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Algonquin Round Table. Some Lost Generation writers were significant to the development of these movements, particularly as they felt free to explore new ideas and buck against conventions while living in Paris. Among Modernist writers’ central concerns were the alienation and fragmentation in society caused by the war and urbanization. Seeking new modes of expression to reflect this changed reality (or to unify the past with the present), Modernists experimented with such radical forms as stream of consciousness or nonlinear narratives. Examples include:
- Gertrude Stein’s poetry collection Tender Buttons (1914)
- Ezra Pound’s poems The Cantos (1915–68)
- T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922)
- James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922)
- Jean Toomer’s novel Cane (1923)
- William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- Hart Crane’s long poem The Bridge (1930)
- Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931)
- Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936)
Imagism was a movement within Modernism that emphasized the use of direct and sparse language and precise images in poetry. Pound was one of its leaders along with H.D., Richard Aldington, and F.S. Flint. The Imagists were closely associated with the little magazines, which were important disseminators of the experimental endeavors and ideas that characterized the arts of the early 20th century. Publications such as Poetry (founded by Harriet Monroe), the Egoist (founded by Dora Marsden), and The Little Review (founded by Margaret Anderson) showcased Imagist poetry and, in many respects, documented the creative explorations of American expatriates.
The Harlem Renaissance and the Algonquin Round Table were both centered in the United States (in New York City), but their members included both expatriates and war veterans. The first of these movements was a blossoming of African American culture that also encompassed music, theater, and visual arts. Its artists sought to reconceptualize “the Negro” from the white stereotypes that had influenced Black Americans’ relationships to their heritage and to each other. Prominent writers of the movement included Toomer, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen, all of whom lived or studied in France between the two world wars.
As its name suggests, the Harlem Renaissance is often characterized as celebratory in spirit, in contrast to the disillusionment felt by the Lost Generation. Yet many Black writers of the era used their art to address racism, classism, and other challenging topics. They also produced works that featured feminist and homoerotic sensibilities. Queer and feminist themes were common in Lost Generation literature, as in the writing of Stein, H.D., Crane, and Barnes. Meanwhile, Lost Generation novels such as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) skewered the American Dream. The story of self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby and his ill-fated pursuit of the wealthy and married Daisy Buchanan, it also contains deft criticisms of consumerism, eugenics, industrialization, and classism and examines the changing roles of women after the war.
Similarly, at surface level the works of the members of the Algonquin Round Table may bear little resemblance to those of the Lost Generation. The Round Table writers, which included critics Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, met daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, a ritual that reportedly began in June 1919 as a one-off welcome home party for Woollcott after his return from serving in World War I. The luncheons became famous for their displays of razor-sharp wit, urbane sophistication, and competitive bonhomie. But the writing and conversation of the Round Table crowd had a tough, cynical, hard-bitten tone. It was a worldview that many Lost Generation writers would have found familiar.
Parker, who also went to Europe in the 1920s, was one of Hemingway’s biggest champions. Another Round Table member, humorist and screenwriter Donald Odgen Stewart, was part of the group that joined Hemingway in Spain during the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona in 1924 and 1925, and he became one of the models for the character Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises.
Last works and memoirs of the Lost Generation
In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period. The last representative works of the era were Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934), Dos Passos’s The Big Money (1936), and Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). Among the memoirs that capture the Lost Generation’s fertile expatriate period are Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934), Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together: An Autobiography (1938), to which Kay Boyle added chapters and an afterword in a 1968 edition, and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964). Janet Flanner’s Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939 (1972) also offers reflections on the cultural and political milieu of Paris between the wars.
