What Was The Lost Generation?

The "Lost Generation" defines a sense of moral loss or aimlessness apparent in literary figures during the 1920s. The phrase signifies a disillusioned postwar generation characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress, and a mood of futility and despair leading to hedonism. World War I seemed to have destroyed the idea that if you acted virtuously, good things would happen. Many good, young men went to war and died, or returned home either physically or mentally wounded, and their faith in the moral guideposts that had earlier given them hope, were no longer valid...they were "Lost."

Although the description -- in its original sense -- only applied to survivors of the war who had been unable or unwilling to settle back into the routines of peacetime life, other writers eagerly adopted the catch phrase, using it more and more loosely until “The Lost Generation” came to signify the whole anonymous horde of young Americans abroad, particularly those with literary or artistic inclinations.

In A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1964 after both Hemingway and Stein were dead, Hemingway reveals that the phrase was actually originated by the garage owner who serviced Stein's car. She was unimpressed by the skills of a young car mechanic and asked the garage owner where the young man had been trained. The garage owner told her that while young men were easy to train, it was those in their mid-twenties to thirties, the men who had been through World War I, whom he considered a "lost generation" — une génération perdue. Stein, in telling Hemingway the story, 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.”

When Hemingway heard the story at the rue de Fleurus, he decided to use the sentence "You are all a lost generation" (attributing it to Gertrude Stein) as an epigraph for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, a story about the 'uncivilized', aimless lives of the very people M. Pernollet had in mind. Due to the book's tremendous success, the phrase was guaranteed enduring fame.

The novel serves to epitomize the post-war expatriate generation. However, Hemingway himself 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"; he believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.

Questions To Think About

Do you consider your generation to be "lost" as this generation was?

If these authors were still around today do you think they would consider your generation to be "lost" just as Gertrude Stein considered them to be?

Can you relate to any of these authors? If so which ones and why?

Ford Madox Ford


Ford Madox Ford (17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939), born Ford Hermann Hueffer , he was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature. He is now remembered best for his publications The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–28) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–08). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer's "100 Greatest Novels of All Time", and The Guardian's "1000 novels everyone must read".

Ford was born to Catherine and Francis Hueffer, the eldest of three; his brother was Oliver Madox Hueffer. His father, who became music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. His paternal grandfather Johann Hermann Hüffer was first to publish the fellow Westphalian poet and author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, a Catholic aristocrat. He used the name of Ford Madox Hueffer and during 1919 changed it to Ford Madox Ford (allegedly, in the aftermath of World War I because "Hueffer" sounded too German) in honour of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written.

One of his most famous works is The Good Soldier (1915), a novel set just before World War I which chronicles the tragic lives of two "perfect couples" using intricate flashbacks. In the "Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford”, his wife, that prefaces the novel, Ford reports that a friend pronounced The Good Soldier“the finest French novel in the English language!” Ford pronounced himself a "Tory mad about historic continuity" and believed the novelist's function was to serve as the historian of his own time.

Ford was involved with British war propaganda after the beginning of World War I. He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, managed by C. F. G. Masterman, with other writers and scholars who were popular during that time, such as Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books for Masterman, namely When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (1915), with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations (1915).

After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted at 41 years of age into the Welch Regiment on 30 July 1915, and was sent to France, thus ending his cooperation with the War Propaganda Bureau. His combat experiences and his previous propaganda activities inspired his tetralogy Parade's End (1924–1928), set in England and on the Western Front before, during and after World War I.

Ford also wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism, and collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924, although written much earlier). During the three to five years after this direct collaboration, Ford's best known achievement was The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908), historical novels based on the life of Katharine Howard, which Conrad termed, at the time, "the swan song of historical romance."

Ford's novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911, extensively revised during 1935) is, in a sense, the reverse of Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

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