The Lost Generation in Modernism
Gertrude Stein reportedly quoted the mechanic who fixed her car when she branded the young group of artists and writers who attended her Paris salon as "a lost generation." Ernest Hemingway borrowed that line (cause it's awesome) for the epigraph of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises.
This super-wise repairman based his view on the idea that the ages of 18-25 generally marked the period during which individuals became civilized members of society. But the soldiers returning from WWI, which ended in 1919, had missed this crucial "becoming a good citizen" period. They also returned traumatized by crazypants modern warfare: poison gas and trenches don't exactly make for happy memories.
Modernism marked an age of accelerated technological change—both on and off the battlefield. Some of this change we would probably list as positive (cars! movies!), but also there were also a whole lot of check marks in the "Technology Is Evil" side of the list.
Airplanes are awesome, right? Sure, until they're used in warfare in WWI. The same goes for automobiles, which brought tanks to the battlefield. Aerial photography made bombing from the air more accurate, which was good if you were on the right side of the camera but not so hot if you weren't. Basically, war was more brutal than ever before.
So it's no shocker that young men began to question traditional wisdoms and new innovations. The authorities (a stand-in for traditional wisdoms) sent these men into battle, and new innovations in weaponry helped kill, maim, or haunt them. No wonder this generation didn't trust anyone. And if you don't know who to trust, it's pretty easy to feel, well, lost.
Chew On This
Though Hemingway's writing style seems much more straightforward and conventional than other Modernist writers' (although that's not saying much!) it still captures the spirit of the period: Hemingway refuses to tell us how to feel.
Trench warfare, perhaps made possible by the invention of barbed wire, was its own sort of hell, as the World War I British poet, Isaac Rosenberg testifies in his poem, "Dead Man's Dump." Rosenberg's poem is like a close-up lens that gives us an individual's view of the war.