The "Lost Generation" was the generation that came of age during World War I. Demographers Strauss and Howe use 1883–1900 as birth years for this generation. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to Gertrude Stein, who was then his mentor and patron. This generation included artists and writers who came of age during the war such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Olaf Stapledon, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Glenway Wescott, Waldo Peirce, Isadora Duncan, Abraham Walkowitz, Ezra Pound, Alan Seeger, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Cowley, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Erich Maria Remarque and the composers Sergei Prokofiev, Paul Hindemith, George Gershwin, and Aaron Copland.




The literature figures of the Lost Generation tended to use common themes in their writing. These themes mostly pertained to the writers' experiences in World War I and the years following it. It is said that the work of these writers was autobiographical based on their use of mythologized versions of their lives.One of the themes that commonly appears in the authors' works is decadence and the frivolous lifestyle of the wealthy.Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald touch on this theme throughout their novels, The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby. Another theme that is common for these authors was the death of the American dream, which is exhibited throughout many of their novels.It is most prominent in The Great Gatsby, in which the character Nick Caraway comes to realize the corruption he was surrounded by.