The Lost Generation

The American expatriates of postwar Paris who wrote the First World War's hangover into the century's style.

Specifications & Metrics

era

c. 1918 – 1935

region

Paris, France

key figures

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound

exemplar

The Sun Also Rises (1926); The Great Gatsby (1925)

introduced

1918

Core Principles & Analysis

• Gertrude Stein's remark to Hemingway supplied the name, which he used as an epigraph.
• Paris's cheap rents and Shakespeare and Company anchored the expatriate circle.
• Its spare style and disillusion set American prose's modern course.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Lost Generation