Lost Generation

Abstract

Though first intended to denote Americans brought to Europe by the First World War, the “Lost Generation” refers to writers and other artists from the United States who took up residence in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. The words themselves were first attributed to Gertrude Stein by Ernest Hemingway. In surveying the waste of the conflict, Stein observed the lack of surviving male role models and supposedly defined, in fact, a generation of lost young men that might transcend national origin. American expatriation is as old as the United States, of course, but Stein’s comments brought attention to Americans who came to Europe, or returned to the continent, in the post–World War I period. Writers from the United States discussed, at length, what they believed to be the provincial and restrictive attitudes of their homeland, so that the perception grew quickly that Americans abroad were in Europe to tempt debauchery. Harold Stearns, a prominent social critic, led a call for young people to venture beyond the United States, but his own experience in France was punctuated by drinking and gambling. Indeed, by the time that the idea of a Lost Generation started to gain currency, the “lost” in the moniker had truly moved from “abandoned” to a sense of moral dissipation, and reports of expatriate mischief had been reinforced by the publication in 1926 of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a fictionalized retelling of expatriate life. While a wave of Americans had spread out over the continent, a colony of artists from the United States really had established themselves in Paris, using the mechanisms of a burgeoning print culture to reject perceptions about them and to forge new collaborations with their European hosts. Successive waves of expatriates were finally blunted by the stock market crash in New York in 1929, and those Americans who had returned home began to provide serious analysis of a decade spent abroad, most commonly defending their cohort or disavowing, outright, a Lost Generation. Some expatriates who stayed abroad through the 1930s were caught up in the Second World War, and their repatriation was connected, inextricably, with those European artists who fled that conflict. By the late 1940s, a vibrant cohort of writers and other artists from the United States were again flocking to Paris. Once more, Americans abroad were rejecting the Lost Generation moniker, but this time it was to differentiate their experiences from those of their predecessors.