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either physically or mentally wounded, and their faith in the moral guideposts that had earlier given them hope, were no longer valid...they were "Lost."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?

Kay Boyle


Kay Boyle,  (born February 19, 1902, St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.—died December 27, 1992, Mill Valley, California), American writer and political activist noted throughout her career as a keen and scrupulous student of the interior lives of characters in desperate situations.

Boyle grew up mainly in Europe, where she was educated. Financial difficulties at the onset of World War I took the family back to the United States, to Cincinnati, Ohio. In June 1923 she married and soon moved with her husband to France. Shortly after settling there she began publishing poems and short stories regularly in such influential expatriate periodicals as Broom and Transition and in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry; and in 1929 she published her first book, a collection entitled Wedding Day and Other Stories.

Her first novel, Plagued by the Nightingale, appeared in 1931. In that year she divorced her first husband and married Laurence Vail, an expatriate American writer with whom she lived in the French Alps until July 1941, when she returned to the United States. After World War II, married for a third time, she was stationed in France and West Germany while serving as foreign correspondent for The New Yorker (1946–53). She and her third husband, Joseph, baron von Franckenstein, an Austrian who became an American citizen and worked for the U.S. foreign service, faced Senate loyalty hearings during the McCarthy era. Boyle later taught at several colleges and universities in the United States, notably San Francisco State College (now University). Believing that privilege brings social responsibility, she was a political activist throughout her life.

Boyle twice won the O. Henry Award for outstanding short stories, for “The White Horses of Vienna” (1935) and “Defeat” (1941). Among her notable novels are Monday Night (1938) and Generation Without Farewell (1960). Her major short-story collections include The White Horses of Vienna, and Other Stories (1936), The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany (1951), and Fifty Stories (1980). Two critically acclaimed verse collections are Testament for My Students and Other Poems (1970) and This Is Not a Letter and Other Poems (1985). Her complete verse was published in Collected Poems of Kay Boyle (1991).

Boyle and Robert McAlmon coauthored Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930 (1968, reissued 1997), a book McAlmon began in 1934 that was revised after his death by Boyle, who wrote alternate chapters and added an afterword. The book provides a detailed, firsthand portrait of the expatriate writers in Paris during the 1920s. Words That Must Somehow Be Said: Selected Essays of Kay Boyle, 1927–1984 was published in 1985. Process, a long-lost first novel by Boyle (written about 1924) was discovered and edited by Sandra Spanier and published posthumously in 2001.

Boyle’s early works center on the conflicts and disappointments that individuals encounter in their search for romantic love. Her later fiction usually deals with the need for an individual’s commitment to wider political or social causes as a prerequisite to attaining self-knowledge and fulfillment. Her writing is marked by great intelligence and sophistication, finely wrought and sometimes almost private language, and, particularly early on, a fascination with the morbid, decadent, and fastidious.

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