The Lost Generation: Who were they, actually? 

Very few of you must have heard the term ‘Lost Generation’. It refers to the generation and particularly a group of American authors who came of age and became reputed literary figures during and after World War I. You must be wondering why they are known as Lost Generation. Well, the values that the members of Lost Generation were taught seemed to have lost relevance amidst the grim reality of post-World War I.  Haunted and disillusioned by the aftermath of one of the most horrific wars of world history, this group of authors believed the United States was hopelessly intolerant, materialistic, and spiritually empty. 

Reading the mind of the Lost Generation 
After World War I, the survivors had to come to terms with the unacceptably horrifying situations that they faced or read about and the losses they encountered. So, instead of enjoying a joyful ride through nooks and corners of life, people of the Lost Generation, now in their 20s and 30s, were striving hard to gather their broken pieces and move forward. The massive scale of the loss of life that they witnessed during the war, rendered them directionless, leading them to reject the traditional ideas of morality, gender and proper living. They developed a tendency to live life aimlessly and recklessly, focussing only on material wealth. They were also dismissive of return to normalcy campaign of the then US president Warren G. Harding who urged the Americans to restore life to how it was before the war. This is because, members of the Lost Generation felt that this policy was blind to what they have experienced during the war. They believed that it was impossible to resume the pre-war normalcy. 

Hoe was the term coined? 
This is an interesting story indeed. Gertrude Stein, a modern American author, poet, and art collector who lived most of her adult life in Paris, was witness to a verbal exchange between a French garage owner and his young employee. The owner told him, “You are all a lost generation.” Stein mentioned this to her colleague and pupil Ernest Hemingway, who popularized the term in the epigraph to his classic novel The Sun Also Rises in 1926. 

Acclaimed writers and Celebrated poets  
In literary terms, Lost Generation, refers to a group of well-known American writers who lived in Paris and wrote about their internal struggles. Many American writers who were living in Paris during the 1920s. Mostly, they were members of the Lost Generation, including Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, and Hart Crane. Some of the notable works of this period include Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tales of the Jazz Age among others. All these works depict shallow, meaningless, and materialist living.