Generations · 1 of 11
The first generation anyone bothered to name.
Who was the Lost Generation?
The Lost Generation were born roughly 1883 to 1900 and came of age in the First World War. Gertrude Stein's phrase, printed by Hemingway in 1926, named the young adults who fought that war and lived loudly through the 1920s. In Strauss and Howe's theory, Gen X is their modern echo.
The years, by who you ask
Nobody owns these lines. Each researcher draws them for their own reasons, so the edges move.
Pew Research Center does not report on this generation. By the time modern polling took off, it was already old; today its members have all died.
The world they were born into
What was going on while they were small, and while they were young enough for it to stick.
- Childhood1880s–1900sBorn into the Gilded Age, as railways, electric light and the telephone spread through American cities.
- The war1917–1918The United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. American casualties ran to 323,000, with 116,516 killed. 3
- The flu1918The 1918 influenza pandemic infected about 500 million people, a third of the world's population, and killed at least 50 million, about 675,000 of them in the United States. 4
- The twenties1920sTheir young adulthood ran into the boom years of the 1920s, the decade their writers made famous. 2
- The crash1929The stock market peaked on 3 September 1929, fell nearly 13 percent on Black Monday, 28 October, and by summer 1932 was 89 percent below its peak. It did not regain its 1929 high until November 1954. 5
Where the name came from
The phrase is Gertrude Stein's: "You are all a lost generation." Ernest Hemingway put it at the front of his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, and the name passed from a circle of expatriate writers to a whole generation. Hemingway described the conversation it came from in a memoir published in 1964. 2
"Lost" meant disoriented, not missing: young people who had seen the war and could no longer take the old certainties seriously.
How they're usually described
The generalities: what researchers and writers say about the group as a whole. A group portrait, never a person.
Disillusioned. Their literature is full of people back from the war who cannot believe what they were told before it. That picture comes mostly from a small set of famous writers, so it describes the generation's voice better than its average member.
Nomads. Strauss and Howe classify them as a Nomad generation: born during a cultural awakening, given less protection as children than the generations around them, and practical rather than idealistic as adults. 1
Next to the other generations
Who raised them, who they raised, and where the friction and the common ground show up in the data.
The Greatest Generation. Their younger brothers and sisters, and in many families their children. The Lost came home from one world war; the Greatest fought the next one.
Gen X. Their mirror in the four-turnings theory. Strauss and Howe call both Nomad generations, each born during an awakening: the Lost during the religious and reform fervour of the 1880s and 1890s, Gen X during the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. This is the best-known "repeat" the theory claims, and it is a theory, not a measurement. 1
In the long cycle
A theory, not a finding: Strauss and Howe's idea that generations come round in a four-part pattern. How the theory works, and its critics.
The Lost are the Nomads of the previous cycle, born during what Strauss and Howe call the Missionary Awakening. Gen X, born during the Awakening of the 1960s and 1970s, is the next Nomad generation. 1
The decades they were born in
The Lost Generation were born before the decades this site covers (1950s onward). The Boomers are, broadly, their grandchildren.
Questions people ask
Why is it called the Lost Generation?
Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway "You are all a lost generation", and he printed it at the front of The Sun Also Rises in 1926. Lost meant disoriented by the First World War, not missing.
What years were the Lost Generation born?
Usually 1883 to 1900, the years Strauss and Howe use.
Which generation is most like the Lost Generation?
In the four-turnings theory, Gen X. Both are Nomad generations born during a cultural awakening. That comparison comes from a theory, not from survey data.
History remembers a generation. Your card remembers you.
Your generation is the crowd you were born into. Your card is worked out from your own birthday, minute and place: the sky that night, your numbers and your Chinese year. Sealed until you print it.
What your card covers
See all six pages, sealedFold the pages back
1 Who you are
2 The machine says
3 Your sky
4 Love & your people
5 Work & money
6 Your year ahead
Sources
- Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements, Amanda van Eck Duymaer van Twist and Suzanne Newcombe (Inform), 2017, updated 15 January 2021. Read on .
- Generational Cohorts, Wordorigins.org, David Wilton, 20 October 2020. Read on .
- U.S. Entry into the War to End All Wars, U.S. National Archives, Prologue blog, 4 April 2017. Read on .
- 1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus), CDC (archived page). Read on .
- Stock Market Crash of 1929, Federal Reserve History, Gary Richardson and others. Read on .