In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the surprising origins of a well-known phrase
Who coined the phrase ‘Lost Generation’? The term has become synonymous with the generation of American expatriates living in France after the First World War: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other men in their early twenties during the early twenties. Most people credit the origins of the phrase ‘Lost Generation’ to Gertrude Stein, another American expatriate living in France at the time (albeit one who was a whole generation older than the Lost Generation). But did Stein actually coin it? And if she didn’t, who did?
