Lost Generation, a group of American writers who came of age during World War

I and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term is also used more
generally to refer to the post-World War I generation.
The term embraces Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E.
Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris
the centre of their literary activities in the 1920s. They were never a literary school.

In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works lost the
distinctive stamp of the postwar period. The last representative works of the era were
Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and Dos Passos’s The Big Money(1936).

John Dos Passos, in full John Roderigo Dos Passos, (born Jan. 14, 1896, Chicago,
Ill., U.S.—died Sept. 28, 1970, Baltimore, Md.), American writer, one of the major
novelists of the post-World War I “lost generation,” whose reputation as a social
historian and as a radical critic of the quality of American life rests primarily on his
trilogy U.S.A.
The son of a wealthy lawyer of Portuguese descent, Dos Passos graduated
from Harvard University(1916) and volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I.
His early works
basically portraits of the artist recoiling from the shock of his encounter with a brutal
world. Among these was the bitter antiwar novel Three Soldiers (1921).
Extensive travel in Spain and other countries while working as a newspaper
correspondent in the postwar years