Group of U.S. writers who came of age during World War I and established their reputations in the 1920s; more broadly, the entire post–World War I American generation.
The term was coined by Gertrude Stein in a remark to Ernest Hemingway . The writers considered themselves "lost" because their inherited values could not operate in the postwar world and they felt spiritually alienated from a country they considered hopelessly provincial and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald , John Dos Passos , E.E. Cummings , Archibald MacLeish , and Hart Crane , among others.