Many prominent American writers and poets of the richly literate 1920s, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and e.e. cummings, were described as “lost.” After coming of age during World War I, the “lost generation” had become disillusioned with the values and traditions passed down from previous generations. President Warren G. Harding’s call for a “return to normalcy” following the devastation of war rang spiritually hollow, and America seemed irretrievably provincial and materialistic. Feeling alienated from their home country, the lost generation responded by moving to Paris and living with reckless abandon.

The group gained its designation when Gertrude Stein (one of the original emigres) told Hemingway, “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.” Although Hem-ingway originally disapproved of the name, he later used it in the preface to The Sun Also Rises, a novel featuring a cast of hard-drinking, disenchanted expatriates living without faith or direction in postwar Paris. Hemingway’s use of the phrase made it famous.

By 1930, most of the lost generation had returned to America; some were forced to return due to falling stock fortunes. As the members went their separate ways, their works lost the flavor of postwar disillusionment.

PostScript: In 1934, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer depicted what was left of Paris’ formerly brilliant Latin Quarter. Stein lived in Paris until the city came under German occupation in 1940, a prelude to World War II. Hemingway later evoked the magic of his Paris years in his memoir A Moveable Feast.