Lost Generation
Based on Wikipedia: Lost Generation
Gertrude Stein said it first, in a Paris garage sometime in the early 1920s. A mechanic working on her car had done a sloppy job, and his boss chewed him out: "You are all a lost generation." Stein turned to her young friend Ernest Hemingway and applied the label to him and everyone like him—the young Americans and Europeans who had come of age during the catastrophe of the First World War. Hemingway made the phrase famous by using it as the epigraph to his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.
But what did "lost" mean?
Not lost as in dead, though millions certainly were. Not lost as in misplaced. Lost as in disoriented. Wandering. Directionless. These were young men and women who had been told that sacrifice and hardship would lead to glory and redemption, and then watched that promise dissolve in the mud of Flanders and the trenches of Verdun. They came out the other side with their faith in the old certainties shattered.
The First Named Generation
The Lost Generation holds a curious distinction in demographic history: it was the first generation to be given a name at all. Before them, people simply grew up when they grew up. The idea that everyone born within a certain span of years might share common characteristics and experiences—that they might constitute a recognizable cohort with its own identity—was itself a new concept.
Historians William Strauss and Neil Howe define the Lost Generation as those born between 1883 and 1900. This means they came of age—reaching their late teens and early twenties—either in the 1900s or the 1910s. They were the first generation to mature entirely in the twentieth century, that age of unprecedented technological change and unprecedented violence.
Different countries had different names for them. In Europe, they were often called the "Generation of 1914," after the year the war began. In France, they were sometimes called the Génération du feu—the "fire generation" or "gunfire generation." In Britain, the term originally referred specifically to those who had died in the war, particularly upper-class casualties who were seen as having died disproportionately, robbing the country of its future elite.
And there was reason for that perception. The war killed poets like Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, the physicist Henry Moseley (whose death may have set back atomic physics by years), the composer George Butterworth. Britain lost what many believed was the flower of its youth.
The World They Grew Up In
To understand why the First World War shattered this generation so completely, you need to understand the world they knew before it.
Children of the Lost Generation grew up in societies that were more literate, more consumerist, and more media-saturated than any in human history. The Industrial Revolution had transformed daily life in ways their grandparents could barely have imagined. By 1900, illiteracy had fallen to just eleven percent in the United States, around three percent in Britain, and a mere one percent in Germany. Mass-produced magazines targeted specific audiences—including, for the first time, young girls as well as boys. In 1895, projected moving images were shown to a paying audience in Paris for the first time, and by the start of the war, a genuine film industry had developed.
Sewer systems had become widespread in industrial cities, dramatically reducing deaths from diseases like cholera. Legal standards for drinking water were being introduced. Child mortality, while still shockingly high by modern standards—one in ten American infants died before their first birthday in 1900—was noticeably lower than it had been for their parents and grandparents.
And yet this was still a world of gas lamps and candles. Electricity was spreading, but slowly. Beating children for misbehavior was not merely common but considered the duty of a responsible caregiver. Most children left school at twelve or thirteen, sometimes as young as nine or ten. In 1900, only eleven percent of American teenagers were enrolled in high school. The ideal family arrangement remained the man as breadwinner and authority figure, the woman as keeper of home and children, with three generations often sharing a single house.
It was, in short, a world of rapid material progress wrapped in strictly conservative social values. A world where young people were taught to respect authority, to believe in duty and sacrifice, to trust that their elders knew what was best.
Then came the war.
The Scale of the Catastrophe
Numbers can only convey so much. But consider these: more than seventy million people were mobilized during the First World War. Of those, roughly 8.5 million were killed and twenty-one million were wounded. Another two million died of disease. Individual battles sometimes produced hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Sixty million of the soldiers came from the European continent alone, which had spent decades building up massive conscription systems. In peacetime, young men were expected to undergo brief military training before spending the rest of their lives in the army reserve. When war came, whole populations could be called up.
The proportions are staggering. Fifty-five percent of Italian and Bulgarian men between eighteen and fifty were called to military service. In Serbia, the figure was sixty-three percent. In Austria-Hungary, seventy-eight percent. In France and Germany, eighty-one percent of all military-aged men served in the war.
Britain, which had traditionally relied on its Royal Navy rather than a large standing army, did not introduce conscription until 1916. Even so, around five million British men fought in the war—out of a total United Kingdom population of forty-six million, including women, children, and the elderly.
The colonial empires contributed as well. Three million men from across the British Empire served as soldiers and laborers. France recruited 475,000 soldiers from its colonies. The United States enlisted four million. The Ottoman Empire mobilized nearly three million.
And beyond the raw death toll, there was the damage to those who survived. The war left countless young men with severe mental health problems—what was then called "shell shock"—and crippling physical disabilities. It also devastated something harder to measure: their faith in the world they had been raised to believe in.
The Collapse of Faith
The young men who marched off to war in 1914 had been raised on stories of heroism and glory. Battle was supposed to be ennobling. Hardship was supposed to build character. Sacrifice for one's country was supposed to be the highest calling a man could answer.
Then they spent years in trenches, watching their friends die from poison gas and machine gun fire, gaining and losing the same few hundred yards of mud month after month, year after year. They witnessed suffering on a scale that rendered their childhood pieties absurd. And when it was over, when the killing finally stopped, many found themselves asking: for what?
The peace settlement satisfied almost no one. Germany felt humiliated. Italy felt cheated. The old empires—Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, Tsarist Russia—had collapsed, leaving chaos in their wake. Russia descended into revolution, civil war, famine, and terror before emerging as the Soviet Union. The resentments of the peace would, within a generation, fuel the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy.
Small wonder that so many survivors felt lost. The word captures something essential about their predicament. They had been promised that their suffering would mean something, would lead somewhere better. Instead, they found themselves adrift in a world that seemed to have learned nothing from all that death.
Women's War
Though the soldiers in the trenches were exclusively men, the war transformed women's lives as well.
With millions of men away at the front, women stepped into jobs that had been exclusively male. They worked in factories and heavy industry. Some took on non-combat military roles. Many—particularly wealthier women—threw themselves into voluntary work, caring for the wounded and refugees. For some, it was their first experience of manual labor.
This reshaping of gender roles terrified traditionalists. If women could do men's work, what would happen to the natural order of society? Would men come home to find themselves unemployed, their wages undercut? As soon as the war ended, most women were pushed out of the jobs they had taken.
But the old order could not be fully restored. The war had killed so many men that many young women who had expected to marry found no husbands available. This accelerated a trend toward female independence and careers. And politically, women's contributions to the war effort strengthened demands for suffrage. In the years after 1918, women's voting rights expanded dramatically across the Western world.
Meanwhile, war widows faced crushing burdens. Losing a husband often meant losing the household's primary income. Pensions and financial assistance helped, but raising children alone was financially and emotionally devastating. Widows who remarried or were accused of "improper behavior" could lose their benefits. Some turned to alcohol. Some fell into depression. Some took their own lives.
The Flapper and the Roaring Twenties
The immediate aftermath of the war was grim. Political violence continued. Economies tottered. And then came the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which had the cruel peculiarity of killing young adults in disproportionate numbers—the same age group that had borne the brunt of the war.
But by the early 1920s, especially in major cities, something shifted. A new spirit took hold—one of recklessness, pleasure-seeking, rebellion against everything the older generation represented. If sacrifice and duty had led only to slaughter, then perhaps the young had earned the right to live for themselves.
This was the Roaring Twenties. The Jazz Age. The era of the flapper—a new type of young woman who scandalized her elders by cutting her hair into a bob, wearing shorter dresses and more makeup, smoking and drinking in public, dancing to jazz, and treating sexuality with a frankness that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.
The Lost Generation, the cohort that had endured the war, drove these cultural changes. They had seen too much to believe in Victorian propriety anymore. In the cafés of Paris, a community of American expatriate writers—Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein herself—created literature that captured the spirit of the age: spare, ironic, stripped of illusion.
It was a rebellion born of trauma. The partying and the recklessness and the determined frivolity were ways of coping with what they had witnessed, ways of insisting on life in the face of so much death.
What Came After
The party ended in 1929, when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. The Lost Generation, now in their thirties and forties, watched their economic security evaporate. They had survived the war; now they had to survive the collapse of the global economy.
And then, in their fifties and sixties, they watched their own children march off to another world war. The sons of the Lost Generation became the soldiers of World War Two—the cohort that would later be called the Greatest Generation. The cycle repeated itself, though this time with a clearer moral purpose: fighting fascism felt less pointless than the murky imperial rivalries of 1914.
Members of the Lost Generation who survived into old age tended to reach retirement and average life expectancy during the decades after World War Two. Two of them became President of the United States: Harry S. Truman, who served from 1945 to 1953, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served from 1953 to 1961. Both were men shaped by the First World War—Truman as an artillery captain, Eisenhower as a young officer who trained troops for combat in France.
The last known member of the Lost Generation died in 2018. Her name was Nabi Tajima, a Japanese woman who passed away at the age of 117. She was also the last person confirmed to have been born in the nineteenth century. With her death, an entire generation became ancestral—part of history rather than living memory.
The Name That Stuck
Why did Gertrude Stein's casual remark in a Paris garage become the label for an entire generation?
Perhaps because "lost" captured something true about their experience that other names could not. The British term for those who died in the war—also "lost"—emphasized absence and waste. The French "fire generation" emphasized what they endured. The European "Generation of 1914" marked them by a date.
But Stein's phrase captured something about the survivors specifically. They were not merely the generation that had fought and suffered. They were the generation that had come through the other side without a compass. Their old certainties had been burned away, and nothing had yet emerged to replace them.
Lost: disoriented, wandering, directionless. It was a diagnosis more than a name. And it stuck because it was accurate.
Hemingway, who did as much as anyone to spread the term, had his own complicated relationship with it. He used it ironically in The Sun Also Rises, following the "lost generation" epigraph with a quotation from Ecclesiastes: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever." Was the Lost Generation uniquely lost? Or was every generation lost in its own way, stumbling through history as best it could?
The question still resonates. Every generation since has been given its own name—Silent, Baby Boomer, Generation X, Millennial, Gen Z. Each has been defined by the crises that shaped its youth. But the Lost Generation was first. They invented the very idea that a generation could have an identity, could be marked by shared trauma, could rebel together against what had come before.
In that sense, we are all their descendants.