Lost generation

The Lost Generation is the generation that came of age during World War I, which took the lives of 20 million people. "Lost" in this context also means "disoriented, wandering, directionless"—a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the war's survivors in the early post-war years." The term is particularly used to refer to a group of artists, and particularly American expatriate writers, living in Paris during the 1920s. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term; 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." The generation is described as the cohort born between 1883 and 1900.