Lost Generation

The Lost Generation is both Gertrude Stein’s name for young people who served in the war and a phrase Ernest Hemingway remembers resisting even as he made it part of his literary work. In his account, the label begins not as a grand diagnosis but as a garage patron’s rebuke of a young mechanic; Stein then enlarges it into a judgment on an entire generation. Hemingway questions the ease of that judgment, setting it against the specific burdens of wartime service and the harder disciplines of writing and memory.

The Phrase and Its Source

The remark arose after Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein had returned from Canada and were living on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, while the two were still friends. Stein’s Model T Ford had ignition trouble. The young man working at the garage had served in the last year of the war, but, Stein believed, had not been serious or sufficiently prompt in repairing her car. After her protest, the garage patron corrected him severely: “You are all a génération perdue.” The phrase, in the scene’s telling, first belongs to an exchange about work, responsibility, and a delayed repair—not to a formal account of postwar society.

Stein converted the patron’s rebuke into a collective verdict. She told Hemingway, “That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,” and specified that she meant young people who had served in the war. Her accusation that they had no respect for anything and drank themselves to death gave the phrase a moral edge: it cast the generation’s condition as a failure of character as well as a consequence of history. When Hemingway challenged the force of the claim, Stein insisted that they were all a lost generation “exactly as the garage keeper said.” The repetition makes the label sound settled, though its authority comes from a local quarrel and Stein’s insistence rather than from evidence that every young veteran shared the same life.

Hemingway’s Resistance and Reconsideration

Hemingway’s response is not a simple rejection of Stein. He recalls thinking about the young mechanic and wondering whether he had been carried in a vehicle converted into an ambulance. The thought turns the exchange away from a convenient label and toward the physical work of war: ambulances descended mountain roads with full loads of wounded, their brakes burning out until drivers used reverse; empty vehicles were then driven over the mountainside to be replaced by larger Fiats with different brakes. The memory gives the veteran’s service a concrete weight that Stein’s general accusation leaves out.

Walking toward the Closerie des Lilas, Hemingway considers Stein, Sherwood Anderson, egotism, mental laziness, and discipline, then asks himself who is calling whom lost. Looking at the statue of Marshal Ney, alone beneath the shadows of the trees, he broadens the thought beyond veterans of one war. Every generation, he concludes, is lost by something and always has been. The formulation does not deny that the young have suffered; it refuses to treat their condition as unique or to let a single phrase explain it. The statue and the remembered retreat from Moscow widen the timescale, while the garage incident remains the small, imperfect occasion from which the judgment grew.

The recollection also preserves Hemingway’s affection for Stein alongside his disagreement. He remembers her warmth and her generous words about Apollinaire, who died on the day of the Armistice in 1918; in delirium, Apollinaire thought the crowd’s cry of “à bas Guillaume” was directed against him. Hemingway resolves to serve Stein and give her work justice, while rejecting her lost-generation talk and “all the dirty, easy labels.” At home, seeing his wife and son happy beside the fire, he tells his wife, “You know, Gertrude is nice, anyway.” The domestic ending does not settle the argument; it shows that friendship and respect can survive resistance to a friend’s language.

From Recollection to Literary Structure

The phrase returned in Hemingway’s later account of writing his first novel. He says he tried to balance Stein’s quotation from the garage keeper with one from Ecclesiastes. The pairing places a modern, colloquial condemnation beside an older scriptural voice, making the label part of a structural contrast rather than simply adopting it as the book’s verdict. The phrase thus has a double literary life: it records what Stein said, and it becomes material Hemingway can arrange against another account of human history.

That retrospective use matters because Hemingway’s narrative links the label to questions of craft and discipline. Elsewhere in the same recollection, he describes beginning to write again after the theft of the manuscripts in Hadley’s suitcase at the Gare de Lyon. One of the few surviving stories, “Out of Season,” omitted its original ending—the old man’s suicide—according to a theory that an understood omission could strengthen a story and make readers feel more than they could explain. The Lost Generation passage likewise moves between what is said outright and what the surrounding memories complicate: a sweeping accusation is set against the wartime labor it overlooks, and against the narrator’s private affection for the person who voiced it.

A Label Tested by Work and Time

Hemingway’s later account of The Sun Also Rises gives the phrase a further context of labor. In the fall of 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald was upset that Hemingway would not show him the first draft. Hemingway wanted to revise it before discussing or displaying it. In Schruns, he rewrote the first half, took the manuscript to New York to show Max Perkins, and returned to finish revising; Fitzgerald saw it only after the rewritten and cut manuscript had been sent to Scribners. Hemingway remembered the work as his most difficult rewriting, turning a first draft written in a six-week sprint into a novel.

These episodes do not supply a single replacement definition for the Lost Generation. Instead, they place Stein’s phrase beside different kinds of evidence: a veteran’s work at a garage, ambulance journeys down mountain roads, the long aftermath of war, friendship that withstands argument, and the painstaking revision of a novel. Hemingway resists the notion that one label can contain all this. Its lasting force in his recollection comes partly from that resistance: the phrase names a historical judgment, but the narrative keeps testing who made it, what it leaves out, and what disciplined work can make from it.