Era of The Lost Generation

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For other uses, see Lost Generation (disambiguation).

Contents

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?1In literature

?2Other uses

?3References

?4Further reading

?5External links

Gertrude Stein with Ernest Hemingway's son, Jack

In A Moveable Feast, published after Hemingway's and Stein's deaths, Hemingway claims that Stein heard the phrase from a garage owner who serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car quickly enough, the garage owner shouted at the boy, "You are all a "génération perdue."[2]:29 Stein, in telling Hemingway the story, added, "That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."[2]:29[3]

'Lost means

not vanished but disoriented, wandering, directionless— a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the war's survivors in the early post-war years.'[4]

In his memoir A Moveable Feast, published after his death, he writes "I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes." A few lines later, 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?'"[2]