The sheer brutality of the First World War left an indelible mark on those who served in it, with the generation of men that came of age during the war quickly becoming popularly known as the Lost Generation. As employed in the United States, this moniker refers less to the mass loss of life inflicted by wartime fighting than it does to a general sense of disorientation and aimlessness felt by the war’s survivors, especially acute in those early post-war years, during which time soldiers returning home struggled to reconcile their experiences in the trenches of France with the traditional values and “back to normalcy” policy preached by President Warren Harding and others in power. This widespread sentiment of disillusionment was immortalized by the semi-autobiographical work of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both of whom served in World War I and went on to publish novels considered by contemporaries and posterity alike to be representative of the Lost Generation.
Though men from Britain who survived the bloodshed of the war undoubtedly faced many of the same struggles as their American counterparts in re-adapting to the society they had left behind, the British understanding of who constituted the Lost Generation initially differed from that of America in several key respects. Most notably, the term was originally used in Britain to denote those who had died in the war, implicitly referring to the casualties of upper-class young men, who represented to the elder stratum of elites the nation’s future, and who were perceived to have perished in disproportionate numbers.