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Lost Generation refers to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, and John Dos Passos. The coining of the phrase is traditionally attributed to Gertrude Stein^[1] and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast.

More generally, the term is used for the generation of young people coming of age in the United States during and shortly after World War I. For this reason, the generation is sometimes known as the World War I Generation. In Europe, they are most often known as the Generation of 1914, named after the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they are sometimes called the Génération du Feu, the Generation of Fire. Broadly, the term is often used to refer to the younger literary modernists.

The "Lost Generation" was said to be disillusioned by the large number of casualties of the First World War, cynical, disdainful of the notions of morality and propriety of their elders and ambivalent about 19th-century gender ideals. Like most attempts to stereotype entire generations, this over-generalization is true for some individuals of the generation and not true of others. It was somewhat common among people of this group to complain that American artistic culture lacked the sophistication of European work—leading many members to spend large amounts of time in Europe—and/or that all topics worth treating in a literary work had already been covered. This "generation" was also involved with the beginning of jazz music.

• The 1988 film The Moderns locates itself in 1926 Paris during the period of the Lost Generation.
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, covers extensively the theme of the lost generation from the perspective of a German soldier returning from World War One.
• The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, looks at the time period through the eyes of an American pilot psychologically damaged by the First World War.

1. ^ As described by Hemingway in the chapter "'Une Generation Perdue'", of A Moveable Feast, the term was coined by the owner of the Paris garage where Gertrude Stein took her Model T Ford, and was picked up and translated by her.

• Social issues of the 1920s

• A look at the Lost Generation