Overview
The Lost Generation was the demographic cohort that preceded the Greatest Generation. This generation is generally defined as people born from 1883 to 1900, those who came of age in the 1900s and 1910s and fought in World War I. The term is also particularly used to refer to a group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term, and it was subsequently popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: "You are all a lost generation." "Lost" in this context refers to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early interwar period.