Lost Generation

Lost Generation,
name applied to the disillusioned intellectuals and aesthetes of the years following World War I, who rebelled against former ideals and values but could replace them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. The remark of Gertrude Stein, “You are all a lost generation,” addressed to Hemingway, was used as a preface to the latter's novel The Sun Also Rises, which brilliantly describes an expatriate group typical of the “lost generation.” Other expatriate American authors of the period to whom the term is generally applied include Malcolm Cowley, E.E. Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish, and Ezra Pound.