What the ‘Lost Generation’ Got Right

As one version of the story goes, Ernest Hemingway heard it from Gertrude Stein, who heard it from a French garage owner. “You are all a generation perdue (lost),” said the garage owner to his mechanic, as Stein, matriarch of the American arts colony in 1920s Paris, listened nearby. She hadn’t been satisfied by the mechanic’s repairs to her Model T, which led to the garage owner’s broad condemnation of his employee, a former World War I soldier. The war’s devastation shook the faith many veterans once had in such traditional values as duty and diligence, compromising their usefulness to society. At least that’s how Stein seemed to interpret the allegation, for she later leveled it at another young man with war experience whom she thought lacked purpose, her friend Hemingway, and by extension, his louche companions. Finding it apt enough, Hemingway used it as an epigraph for his semi-autobiographical novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926. The book not only launched his career, it also immortalized the epigraph, and the people.