Lost Generation

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Lost Generation is traditionally attributed to Gertrude Stein^[1] and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast. It refers to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, John Dos Passos, and T. S. Eliot.

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, named after the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they are called the Génération du Feu, the Generation of Fire. Broadly, the term is often used to refer to the younger literary modernists.

William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book Generations list this generation's birth years as 1883 to 1900. Their typical grandparents were the Gilded Generation; their parents were the Progressive Generation and Missionary Generation. Their children were the G.I. Generation and Silent Generation; their typical grandchildren were Baby boomers^{[citation needed]}.

This generation is currently the oldest extant generation in the world.

Contents 1 Traits 2 Celebrities 3 Foreign Peers 4 Surviving members of note 5 Legacy 6 Popular culture 7 Notes 8 See also 9 External links

[edit] Traits

The "Lost Generation" were said to be disillusioned by the large number of casualties of the First World War, cynical, disdainful of the Victorian notions of morality and propriety of their elders and ambivalent about Victorian gender ideals. Like most attempts to pigeon-hole entire generations, this over-generalization is true for some individuals of the generation and not true of others. It was somewhat common among members of this group to complain that American artistic culture lacked the breadth of European work—leading many members to spend large amounts of time in Europe—and/or that all topics worth treating in a literary work had already been covered. Nevertheless, this selfsame period saw an explosion in American literature and in art, which is now often considered to include some of the greatest literary classics produced by American writers^{[citation needed]}. This generation was also involved with the first flowering of jazz music.

[edit] Celebrities

U.S. Generations * = dates disputed, ^ = Strauss and Howe This box: view • talk • edit
Term	Period
^Puritan Generation	1588–1617
Puritan Awakening	1621–1649
^Cavalier Generation ^Glorious Generation ^Enlightenment Generation ^Awakening Generation	1618-1648 1648-1673 1674-1700 1701–1723
First Great Awakening	1727–1746
^Liberty Generation ^Republican Generation ^Compromise Generation	1724–1741 1742–1766 1767–1791
Second Great Awakening	1790–1844
Transcendentalist Generation ^Transcendental Generation ^Gilded Generation ^Progressive Generation	1789–1819 1792–1821 1822–1842 1843–1859
Third Great Awakening	1886–1908
^Missionary Generation Lost Generation Interbellum Generation G.I. Generation Greatest Generation	1860–1882 1883–1900 1900–1910 1900–1924 1911–1924
Jazz Age	1918-1929
^Silent Generation Beat Generation Baby Boomers Generation Jones	1925–1942 fl. 1950s-1960s *1940s-1960s 1954–1965
Consciousness Revolution	1964–1984
Generation X ^13th Generation MTV Generation Boomerang Generation	*1960s–1980s 1961-1981 1974–1985 1977–1986
Culture Wars	1980s–present
Generation Y ^Millennial Generation Echo Boom Generation Internet Generation ^New Silent Generation	*1970s–1990s 1982-2000 *1982–1995 *1994–2001 *1990s or 2000s-?

Sample members of the Lost Generation include the following:

• 1883 Elsa Maxwell (died 1963)
• 1884 Damon Runyon (died 1946)
• 1885 Sinclair Lewis (died 1951)
• 1885 Chester Nimitz (died 1966)
• 1885 Ezra Pound (died 1972)
• 1885 George S. Patton (died 1945)
• 1886 Al Jolson (died 1950)
• 1886 Rose Wilder Lane (died 1968)
• 1887 Fatty Arbuckle (died 1933)
• 1888 T. S. Eliot (died 1965)
• 1888 Irving Berlin (died 1989)
• 1889 Igor Sikorsky (died 1972)
• 1889 Walter Lippmann (died 1974)
• 1890 Aimee Semple McPherson (died 1944)
• 1890 Dwight D. Eisenhower (died 1969)
• 1891 Cole Porter (died 1964)
• 1891 David Curtis Stephenson (died 1966)
• 1891 Earl Warren (died 1974)
• 1891 Nicola Sacco (died 1927)
• 1892 Reinhold Niebuhr (died 1971)
• 1892 Mae West (died 1980)
• 1893 Lilian Gish (died 1993)
• 1893 William March (died 1954)
• 1893 Dorothy Parker (died 1967)
• 1893 Huey Long (died 1935)
• 1894 Norman Rockwell (died 1978)
• 1894 Alfred Kinsey (died 1956)
• 1895 Buckminster Fuller (died 1983)
• 1895 J. Edgar Hoover (died 1972)
• 1895 Babe Ruth (died 1948)
• 1895 Joseph Banks Rhine (died 1980)
• 1896 George Burns (died 1996)
• 1896 F. Scott Fitzgerald (died 1940)
• 1897 Hal Haig Prieste (died 2001)
• 1897 Dorothy Day (died 1980)
• 1897 Elijah Muhammad (died 1975)
• 1897 William Faulkner (died 1962)
• 1898 Paul Robeson (died 1976)
• 1898 Golda Meir (died 1978)
• 1898 Herbert Marcuse (died 1979)
• 1899 Vladimir Nabokov (died 1977)
• 1899 Humphrey Bogart (died 1957)
• 1899 Al Capone (died 1947)
• 1899 Jimmie Davis (died 2000)
• 1899 Ernest Hemingway (died 1961)
• 1899 Alfred Hitchcock (died 1980)
• 1899 Robert W. Welch, Jr. (died 1985)
• 1900 Aaron Copland (died 1990)
• 1900 Adlai Stevenson (died 1965)
• 1900 Louise Nevelson (died 1988)
• 1900 Erich Fromm (died 1980)

Cultural endowments of the Lost Generation include the following:

• The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
• The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot)
• The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
• Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis)
• The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
• Monkey Business (film, The Marx Brothers)
• Creed of an Advertising Man (Bruce Barton)
• An American in Paris (George Gershwin)
• Who's on First?, comedy routine, Abbott and Costello
• The Music Box, short film, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy
• Ain't Misbehavin' (Duke Ellington)
• The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett; later a movie)
• The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler)
• The View from Eighty (Malcolm Cowley)
• Safety Last and The Freshman silent comic films, by Harold Lloyd
• All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
• Escape From Freedom (Erich Fromm)

The Lost Generation produced two Presidents:

• 1884 Harry S. Truman, 1945-1953 (1972)
• 1890 Dwight Eisenhower, 1953-1961 (1969)

They held a plurality in the House of Representatives from 1937 to 1953, a plurality in the Senate from 1943 to 1959, and a majority of the Supreme Court from 1941 to 1967.

[edit] Foreign Peers

• Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)
• Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
• Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)
• John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
• Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)
• Carl Goerdeler (1884-1945)
• Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)
• Hideki Tojo (1884-1948)
• Isoroku Yamamoto (1884-1943)
• Alban Berg (1885-1935)
• Georg Lukács (1885-1971)
• Jan Masaryk (1886-1948)
• Diego Rivera (1886-1957)
• Padre Pio (1887-1967)
• Marc Chagall (1887-1985)
• Bernard Montgomery (1887-1976)
• Vidkun Quisling (1887-1945)
• Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)
• Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938)
• Charles Chaplin (1889-1977)
• Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
• António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970)
• Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964)
• Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
• Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969)
• Fritz Lang (1890-1976)
• Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)
• Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
• Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
• Edith Stein (1891-1944)
• Karl Dönitz (1891-1980)
• Erwin Rommel (1891-1944)
• J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
• Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980)
• Haile Selassie (1892-1975)
• Jomo Kenyatta (1892-1978)
• Manfred von Richthofen "The Red Baron" (1892-1918)
• Francisco Franco (1892-1975)
• Joan Miró (1893-1983)
• Hermann Goering (1893-1946)
• Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893-1946)
• Mao Zedong (1893-1976)
• Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971)
• Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
• Robert Menzies (1894-1978)
• Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)
• Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
• Robert Graves (1895-1985)
• George VI of the United Kingdom (1895-1952)
• Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia (1895-1917)
• Imre Nagy (1896-1958)
• Georgi Zhukov (1896-1974)
• Pope Paul VI (1897-1978)
• Josef Goebbels (1898-1945)
• Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976)
• Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970)
• Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944)
• Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900-1989)
• Louis Mountbatten (1900-1979)
• Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)

[edit] Surviving members of note

• Ruby Muhammad-"Mother of the Nation of Islam" born in 1897.
• Leila Denmark-Pediatrician and researcher born in 1898.
• Boris Efimov-Political cartoonist born in 1900.
• Frederica Sagor Maas-Playwright born in 1900.
• Zheng Ji-Nutritionist born in 1900.

[edit] Legacy

At the turn of the 21st century, a fresh cadre of expatriate writers led by such emerging authors as D.A. Blyler (Steffi's Club) and Arthur Phillips (Prague) asserted a new "Lost Generation" among readers, paying homage to their literary peers of 1920s Paris (see External links).

[edit] Popular culture

• The 1988 film The Moderns locates itself in 1926 Paris during the period of the Lost Generation.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ 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.

[edit] See also

• Social issues of the 1920s

[edit] External links

• Prague by Arthur Phillips.
• Steffi's Club by D.A. Blyler.
• A look at the Lost Generation

Preceded by Missionary Generation 1860 – 1882

Lost Generation 1883 – 1900

Succeeded by G.I. Generation 1901 – 1924

Sub-Generations: preceding and following
Preceded by Transcendentalist Generation c. 1789 – 1819	Lost Generation 1883 – 1900	Succeeded by Interbellum Generation c. 1900 – c. 1910