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Lost generation
The Lost Generation refers to the generation of writers and artists immediately after World War I, primarily though certainly not entirely from the United States, who were affected by World War I, disillusioned with the world and who emigrated to Europe, primarily to Paris, where they enjoyed a bohemian life style and produced many key works of modernism. Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald are often considered the key writers of the period and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises the novel that best shows who they were and what they thought. The term is said to have been popularised by Gertrude Stein, who is said to have first heard it from her garage owner (une génération perdue). As Shari Benstock points out in her book (see below), though the men get most of the publicity, there were many women also involved, including Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, Jean Rhys and Gertrude Stein.
Books about the Lost Generation
Shari Benstock: Women of the Left Bank
Malcolm Cowley: Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s
Noel Riley Fitch: Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation
Janet Flanner: Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939
J. Gerald Kennedy: Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity
James R. Mellow: Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company
Craig Monk: Writing the Lost Generation
Donald Pizer: American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place
Amanda Vaill: Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love
Authors of the lost generation
Barnes
Boyle
Dos Passos
Fitzgerald
Ford
Hemingway
Rhys
Stein
Other links
The Lost Generation
The Lost Generation
The Lost Generation and After