The Lost Generation

The "Lost Generation" is a term coined by author and poet Gertrude Stein to characterize a general motif of disillusionment of American literary notables who lived in Paris and Europe after the First World War, especially after military service in the war. Figures identified with the "Lost Generation" included authors and artists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and Cole Porter.
The phrase is attributed to Gertrude Stein, then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast.

Broadly, the term is often used to refer to the younger literary modernists.

Variously, the term is used for the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression, though more generally it is used for the generation of young people in the United States who came of age during and shortly after World War I. (Also sometimes known as the World War I Generation.)[citation needed] In Europe, they are mostly known as the "Generation of 1914," for the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they were sometimes called the Génération du Feu, the Generation of Fire.