Lost Generation

Lost Generation, group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group never formed a cohesive literary movement, but it consisted of many influential American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, and Hart Crane. The group was given its name by the American writer Gertrude Stein, who, in a conversation with Hemingway, used an expression she had heard from a garage manager, une géneration perdue (“a lost generation”), to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I (1914-1918) experiences and disillusioned with American society. Hemingway later used the phrase as an epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926).