The Lost Generation

Lost Generation- Crystal Cox, Diamond

World War I was romanticized to be a great opportunity to serve one’s country, and make good money doing so. Authority figures, who were foreign to the realities of war preached false statements that appealed to the masses. Propaganda also romanticized war to make it more appealing. Boys and men were swept into the war blind to the reality of it. In the war they were exposed to the harsh conditions and mass death. Returning home to people, who were unknown to the traumas of war, made them feel isolated and alone. Many of their friends died and were crippled in the war and they had no one to talk to. This is were the title of the Lost Generation came from. Soldiers returning from the war, injured believed they couldn't achieve the American dream because of their limitations. 1920's writers such as Erich Remarque and F. Scott Fitzgerald express the horrors of war through their writings. In Remarque's, All Quiet on the Western Front, the narrator says, “And men will not understand us--for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten--and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;--the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin..... Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing anymore. I am so alone and so without hope that I can confront them without fear" (Remarque 139 ). This shows how the soldiers felt when they returned from war and the deep depression they were swept into. The Lost Generation fits into the Liberation section because writers desperately tried to inform people and inform them about their ignorance toward the soldiers returning from war and the struggles they went to.

"The Lost Generation." Gale Student Resources in Context. Detroit: Gale, 2011. Research in Context. Web. 1 Oct. 2015. 
Remarque, Erich Maria, and A. W. Wheen. All Quiet on the Western Front. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. Print. Lost Generation Power Point