World War I, originally called the Great War, resulted in more than nine million deaths. The official starting point was the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

Before the war, young men were proud to stand and fight for their country; however, shortly after arriving in Europe and seeing the pointless death and destruction caused by tanks, poisonous gases, machine guns and flamethrowers (all of which were new arms at the time) were traumatized and left to wonder why their country would throw them into the meat grinder in such a fashion.

The generation raised during this time felt abandoned by their country. It was evident that the pillars that they were raised on (patriotism, faith and morality) had gone to the wayside, leaving the disenfranchised youth scrambling to make sense of their purposeless world. This “lost” concept trickled into all aspects of culture including literature and the reckless party “roar” of the 1920s.

Many of the defining literary figures of the Lost Generation (Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald) felt that the America they knew was gone and could not be remedied. The writers criticized the loss of hope that war had taken from an entire generation of people and instead opted for a non-conformist life across the ocean in Europe. A life where patriotism was not mandatory, where faith was lost and morality was a rapidly fading concept.  

The Lost Generation is characterized by disengaged and pointless parties that lasted through the 1920s and ended in 1929 at the beginning of the Great Depression. Feeling that their home in America was gone, many members of the Lost Generation went to Paris.

For Hemingway, this meant the complete and total disregard of flowery language or symbolism. He is known for his simple and blunt sentence structure that, at first glance, exists only on a surface level. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald also ponders the modern life without meaning in his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. It captures the mood of a generation that, because of fighting wars they did not believe in, no longer believes in God or humanity. In his most famous work, The Great Gatsby, he explores the murky morality of the rich during the hyper-hedonistic 1920s. 

The phrase “Lost Generation” originates from a conversation Gertrude Stein overheard between a French garage owner and his employee in the early 1920s. While Stein was waiting for her truck to be repaired, the garage’s owner became displeased with the speed at which his employee, a young veteran of World War I, was working. The owner, in the ensuing argument, accused his employee’s generation of being “une génération perdue”— a lost generation. Stein, later recounting the story to Ernest Hemingway, adopted the label “Lost Generation” to describe the young generation that came out of the war (Hemingway, Moveable Feast 29). Hemingway then popularized the label in the epigraph to his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (Cowley 3).

In the years since Stein first applied the label “Lost Generation” to the World War I generation as a whole, the meaning of the term has contracted and now applies to expatriated American writers living in Paris during the 1920s. Although for the most part, the Lost Generation rejected the guidance of previous generations, they tended to listen more to their innovative literary predecessors (Cowley 9). Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce were particularly influential on Lost Generation writers.

The war experience also affected the Lost Generation’s relationship with other generations. Because they had the unique experience of World War I, they felt irreparably disconnected from previous generations, which allowed them to criticize the world from outsiders’ perspectives. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Scandal Detectives,” “the gulf is infinite and unbridgeable” (qtd. in Cowley 7). But at the same time feelings of separation alienated them from the rest of the world, it tightened their connections with each other, resulting in their proclamations of “kinship with one another” and “separation from older writers” (Cowley 6).

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an Irish American Jazz Age author of novels and short stories. He finished four novels, left a fifth unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories. During World War I, Fitzgerald enlisted in the U.S. Army and fell in love with a rich and beautiful girl, Zelda Sayre, who lived near Montgomery, Alabama, where he was stationed. Zelda broke off their engagement because he was relatively poor. After he was discharged at war's end, he went to seek his literary fortune in New York City in order to marry her. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), became a best-seller, and at 24 they married. They moved to France in 1924 and returned seven years later. Zelda became mentally unstable and had to be institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an alcoholic and died young as a movie screenwriter. Fitzgerald's secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), a story about the American dream of the self-made man.

 Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) spent childhood vacations in Michigan on hunting and fishing trips. He volunteered for an ambulance unit in France during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalized for six months. After the war, as a war correspondent based in Paris, he met expatriate American writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, who in particular, influenced his spare style.

His novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) made him famous. Later he wrote about the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the fighting in China in the 1940s. On a safari in Africa, he was badly injured when his small plane crashed; still, he continued to enjoy hunting and sport fishing, activities that inspired some of his best work. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novella about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; the next year he received the Nobel Prize. 

Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation. But instead of painting its fatal glamour as did Fitzgerald, who never fought in World War I, Hemingway wrote of war, death, and the "lost generation" of cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned. His hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses understatement: In A Farewell to Arms (1929) the heroine dies in childbirth saying "I'm not a bit afraid. It's just a dirty trick." He once compared his writing to icebergs: "There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows."