"THE LOST GENERATION"

For many young Americans, the realities and devastations of WWI affected their psyche in a way that seemed nearly impossible to mend.  The extensive impact the war had on those who fought during it found it an even greater task to assimilate back into the American lifestyle once home, drifting with a sense of aimlessness.  In essence, they were disillusioned, depressed, and unable to cope.  They went to war on the great American ideal that if you do the right thing and act with virtue, good things will come your way.  Yet many of these young soldiers saw the brutality of war first hand, witnessed the mutilation of fellow soldiers, even their deaths, and the arbitrary promise American society propelled seemed like a contrived tactic to soothe their nightmares of a war that took more lives, by percentage, than the second World War.  The war was a catalyst for disillusionment, and many mens’ moral compass was altered, shattered and broken.  The moral guideposts these men faithfully clung to that offered them hope during the years of the war became null and void upon returning home either physically, mentally, and above all morally wounded.  Alas, they were lost.  

Though this gives an accurate description of many young men who faced WWI and its aftermath, the term “Lost Generation” is most notably used for the wave of writers and artists who flocked to Paris in the wake of WWI.  The origins of the term used to describe these artists comes from author Gertrude Stein.  The anecdotal story goes that Stein was getting her car fixed at an auto-shop one day, and the owner complained that his mechanic--a young veteran of the war--lost years of auto training when he was away at war and thus was less skilled than previous generations of mechanics.  He then said his young mechanics were ‘une génération perdue,‘ a lost generation.  Stein, who saw this term befitting of the artists who came to Paris with a disenfranchised mind, recounted this story to Ernest Hemingway.  Hemingway later popularized this label of a young generation coming out of war in the epigraph of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which stands as a personal tribute to his generation’s place in history--albeit, he later shows disdain for this label in A Moveable Feast.  The Lost Generation’s view of the world was dismal, as they viewed it as flawed, hypocritical, rampant with failure, and perceived themselves as unified “...in rebellion against the stuffy people who were misruling the world” (Cowley 8).   

[Gertrude Stein and lover Alice B. Toklas in her Paris apartment, a place where the Lost Generation members frequently gathered]