Lost Generation - Other Uses

Other Uses

Variously, the term is used for the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression, though in the United States it is used for the generation of young people who came of age during and shortly after World War I, alternatively known as the World War I generation. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, well known for their generational theory, define the Lost Generation as the cohorts born from 1883 to 1900, who came of age during World War I and the roaring twenties. In Europe, they are mostly known as the "Generation of 1914," for the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they were sometimes called the Génération au Feu, the "generation in flames."

In Britain the term was originally used for those who died in the war, and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite. Many felt "that 'the flower of youth' and the 'best of the nation' had been destroyed," for example such notable casualties as the poets Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen, composer George Butterworth and physicist Henry Moseley. In the late-2000s recession, the phrase is often used when discussing the high level of youth unemployment.

In China, the term has come to reflect those who took part in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Many Red Guards were university students who dropped out of their studies to pursue a rural lifestyle in accordance with official guidelines, or young professionals who were punished by taking them out of their careers and placing them in developing agricultural 'work' camps or in prison. The education and other opportunties lost to these individuals has other generations referring to the victims and participants as the "Lost Generation" in China.