1883 – 1900
Lost Generation
Coming of age during World War I, the Lost Generation felt disillusioned by pre-war values and reshaped modern art and literature.
Overview
The Lost Generation refers to the cohort that came of age during the First World War. Named by Gertrude Stein and popularized by Ernest Hemingway, they rejected Victorian ideals and pioneered literary modernism from the cafés of Paris to the skyscrapers of New York.
Characteristics
Strengths
Challenges
Interesting facts
- Named by Gertrude Stein and popularized in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
- Fueled the modernist revolution in literature, painting, and film.
- Lived through two world wars and the deepest economic collapse in modern history.
Technology
Grew up alongside the automobile, radio, telephone, and early cinema — the first mass-media generation.
Education
Classical, discipline-driven schooling; university attendance was still rare and largely male.
Workplace
Manual labor, agriculture, and early industrial work dominated; office life was just emerging.
Lifestyle
Roaring Twenties glamour clashed with Depression-era hardship, shaping a starkly bipolar life experience.
Famous people
- Ernest Hemingway
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- T.S. Eliot
- Gertrude Stein
- Pablo Picasso
Famous events
- World War I (1914–1918)
- Spanish Flu (1918)
- Roaring Twenties
- Great Depression (1929)