What does "lost generation" mean?

Question

home work help form the all quiet on the western front.

Answer 1

The 'Lost Generation' is a phrase made popular by American author Ernest Hemingway in his first published novel The Sun Also Rises.[1] Often it is used to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe, some after military service in the First World War. Figures identified with the "Lost Generation" include authors and poets Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, and John Dos Passos.

Contents [hide]

1 Origin of the term

2 Traits

3 Popular culture

4 See also

5 Notes

6 External links



[edit] Origin of the term

The coining of the phrase is sometimes attributed to Gertrude Stein[2] and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast. In the latter, he explained, "I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes." (A few lines after, recalling the risks and losses of the war, he adds, "I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation?")

It also refers to the time period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. 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, for 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.

[edit] Traits

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 held by their elders, and ambivalent about 19th-Century gender ideals. Like most attempts to stereotype entire generations, this generalization may have been true for some individuals and not for others.

It was somewhat popular among people of this generation to spend large amounts of time in Europe, to complain that all topics worth treating in a literary work had already been covered, and to argue that American artistic culture lacked the sophistication of Europe. This "generation" was also involved with the beginning of jazz.

see also: http://www.essortment.com/all/whatlostge...

Answer 2

I have read the other long definitions, and I don't think they quite say what I had always thought.

the lost generation refers to the fact that in wartime, especially the first and second World Wars, the high number of casualties were concentrated around young men of between, say 20-28  (not just).  they were the ones if left at home would be marrying and having children, so there was a lost generation in the sense there were many not born.

Also, in any typical town, there was a shortage of the young men who would do the heavier jobs as they were away fighting, so just looking at the people around you, one was reminded that so many were away or dead.  There was a hole in the natural span of ages and fewer males.

the most poignant quotes that come to mind for me are things like ' They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.