The term “Lost Generation” refers to the generation of people who reached adulthood during or immediately following World War I. Demographers generally consider 1883 to 1900 as the birth year range of the generation.

Having witnessed what they considered pointless death on such a massive scale during the war, many members of the generation rejected more traditional ideas of proper behavior, morality, and gender roles. They were considered to be “lost” due to their tendency to act aimlessly, even recklessly, often focusing on the hedonistic accumulation of personal wealth.

In literature, the term also refers to a group of well-known American authors and poets including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot, whose works often detailed the internal struggles of the “Lost Generation.” 

The term is believed to have come from an actual verbal exchange witnessed by novelist Gertrude Stein during which a French garage owner derisively told his young employee, “You are all a lost generation.” Stein repeated the phrase to her colleague and pupil Ernest Hemingway, who popularized the term when he used it as an epigraph to his classic 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.

In an interview for The Hemingway Project, Kirk Curnutt, author of several books about the Lost Generation writers suggested that they were expressing mythologized versions of their own lives.

Said Curnutt:

Decadent Excesses

Throughout their novels The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, Hemingway and Fitzgerald feature the decedent, self-indulgent lifestyles of their Lost Generation characters. In both The Great Gatsby and Tales of the Jazz Age Fitzgerald depicts an endless stream of lavish parties hosted by the main characters.

With their values so completely destroyed by the war, the expatriate American circles of friends in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast live shallow, hedonistic lifestyles, aimlessly roaming the world while drinking and partying.

Fallacy of Great American Dream

Members of the Lost Generation viewed the idea of the “American Dream” as a grand deception. This becomes a prominent theme in The Great Gatsby as the story’s narrator Nick Carraway comes to realize that Gatsby’s vast fortune had been paid for with great misery.

To Fitzgerald, the traditional vision of the American Dream—that hard work led to success—had become corrupted. To the Lost Generation, “living the dream” was no longer about simply building a self-sufficient life, but about getting stunningly rich by any means necessary.

Gender-Bending and Impotence

Many young men eagerly entered World War I still believing combat to be more of a chivalrous, even glamorous pastime than an inhumane struggle for survival.

However, the reality they experienced—the brutal slaughter of more than 18 million people, including 6 million civilians—shattered their traditional images of masculinity and their perceptions around differing roles of men and women in society.

Left impotent by his war wounds, Jake, the narrator and central character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, describes how his sexually aggressive and promiscuous female lover Brett acts as the man, trying to be “one of the boys” in an effort to control the lives of her sexual partners.

In T.S. Eliot’s ironically titled poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock laments how his embarrassment from feelings of emasculation has left him sexually frustrated and unable to declare his love for the poem’s unnamed female recipients, referred to as “they.”

In the first chapter of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s trophy girlfriend Daisy delivers a telling vision of her newborn daughter’s future.

In a theme that still resonates in today’s feminist movement, Daisy’s words express Fitzgerald’s opinion of his generation as spawning a society that largely devalued intelligence in women.

While the older generation valued women who were docile and subservient, the Lost Generation held mindless pleasure-seeking as the key to a woman’s “success.”

While she seemed to bemoan her generation’s view of gender roles, Daisy conformed to them, acting as a “fun girl” to avoid the tensions of her true love for the ruthless Gatsby.  

Belief in an Impossible Future

Unable or unwilling to come to grips with the horrors of warfare, many of the Lost Generation created impossibly unrealistic hopes for the future.

This is expressed best in the final lines of The Great Gatsby in which narrator Nick exposed Gatsby’s idealized vision of Daisy that had always prevented him from seeing her as she really was. 

The “green light” in the passage is Fitzgerald’s metaphor for the perfect futures we continue to believe in even while watching it get ever farther away from us.

In other words, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Lost Generation continued to believe that “one fine day,” our dreams will come true.

A New Lost Generation?

By their very nature, all wars create “lost” survivors.

While returning combat veterans have traditionally died of suicide and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at much higher rates than the general population, returning veterans of the Gulf War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are at an even higher risk. According to a 2016 report from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, an average of 20 of these veterans a day die from suicide.

Could these “modern” wars be creating a modern “Lost Generation?” With mental wounds often more serious and far more difficult to treat than physical trauma, many combat veterans struggle to reintegrate into civilian society. A report from the RAND Corporation estimates that some 20% of returning veterans either have or will develop PTSD.