“If there is such a thing as a Lost Generation in this country,” Wolfe wrote by then, “it is probably made up of those men of advanced middle age who still speak the language that was spoken before 1929, and who know no other. These men indubitably are lost.” By referring to his generation, in other words, Wolfe was not using a shorthand to refer to any fixed phase of life. He was referring rather to a particular group of people who, over time, aged through every phase of life. Wolfe’s Lost Generation literati never explained exactly how they identified their “generation.” But the question
...more
