The Lost Generation Guild

The Lost Generation Guild is a group to bring book lovers together. The meetings will take place once a week to discuss prose, poetry and ideas at the sl Chicago Herald building. Join us each week. More news to come about the time and date for the first meeting!


Lost Generation was a term used to describe the generation of writers active immediately after World War I. Gertrude Stein used the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway, supposedly quoting a garage mechanic saying to her, "You are all a lost generation”. The phrase signifies a disillusioned post-war generation characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress, and a mood of futility and despair leading to hedonism. The mood is described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in THIS SIDE OF PARADISE (1920) when he writes of a generation that found "all Gods dead, all wars fought all faiths in man shaken”.


"Lost generation" usually refers specifically to the American expatriate writers associated with 1920s Paris, especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and to a lesser extent T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Hemingway used the phrase "You are all a lost generation" as the epigraph to his first novel THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), and the influential critic Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) used "lost generation" in various studies of expatriate writers.