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The Lost Generation Born 1883–1900

How old is the Lost Generation?

The Lost Generation was born from 1883 to 1900, which means its members are currently aged between 125 and 143.

Ages current as of August 8, 2026 · The commonly used range for the cohort that came of age during World War I; exact endpoints are approximate.

The Lost Generation was born into a world of gaslight and horse carts and came of age in the mechanized slaughter of World War I. The survivors — disillusioned with the pieties that had sent them to the trenches — wrote the books, played the jazz, and threw the parties that defined the Roaring Twenties. They are the oldest cohort that generational charts bother to name.

Quick facts

Birth years
1883–1900
Ages in 2026
125 to 143 years old
Generation after
The Greatest Generation (1901–1927)
Where the name comes from
A Paris garage owner, scolding a young mechanic, snapped that the war's survivors were all 'une génération perdue' — a lost generation. Gertrude Stein passed the line to Ernest Hemingway ('You are all a lost generation'), and Hemingway made it immortal as the epigraph of The Sun Also Rises in 1926.
Also known as
the WWI generation · the Generation of 1914

Famous members of the Lost Generation

Every one of them born between 1883 and 1900.

  • Eleanor Roosevelt

    b. 1884

    Politics

    First Lady, then first chair of the UN Human Rights Commission

  • Georgia O'Keeffe

    b. 1887

    Art & design

    The mother of American modernism

  • Charlie Chaplin

    b. 1889

    Film & TV

    The Tramp — cinema's first global superstar

  • Dwight D. Eisenhower

    b. 1890

    Politics

    Supreme Allied Commander, then 34th president

  • Babe Ruth

    b. 1895

    Sport

    The Sultan of Swat invented sports celebrity

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald

    b. 1896

    Literature

    Chronicler-in-chief of the Jazz Age

  • Amelia Earhart

    b. 1897

    Science

    First woman to fly the Atlantic solo

  • Duke Ellington

    b. 1899

    Music

    Half a century of American music, composed nightly

  • Ernest Hemingway

    b. 1899

    Literature

    Ambulance driver at 18; the generation's defining voice

The culture that raised them

Movies

  • The Kid1921Chaplin's Tramp adopts an orphan; the movies learn to break hearts
  • Nosferatu1922Silent horror at its most enduring
  • The Jazz Singer1927Sound arrives — the medium they grew up with becomes the one we know

Music

  • 'Livery Stable Blues'1917The Original Dixieland Jass Band cut the first jazz record; the age got its soundtrack
  • 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' — Irving Berlin1911Ragtime crossed over, and American popular music was born
  • The Cotton Club era1927Duke Ellington's residency broadcast the Harlem Renaissance to the nation

Books

  • The Sun Also Rises1926Hemingway's expat novel carried the generation's name in its epigraph
  • The Great Gatsby1925Fitzgerald's green light — the era's self-portrait
  • The Waste Land1922T.S. Eliot's fractured epic of postwar disillusion

You probably didn't know

The non-obvious markers — the stuff only the Lost Generation remembers.

  • The name began as a garage owner's insult

    'Une génération perdue' was first aimed at a slow young mechanic in France. Stein repeated it to Hemingway; Hemingway put it in print; the insult became an identity.

  • A new Model T cost $440 in 1916

    Ford's assembly line kept cutting the Touring model's price — by the 1920s it fell under $300, and the Lost Generation became the first cohort to grow up with cars.

  • The 1918 flu was deadlier to them than the war

    The influenza pandemic killed about 675,000 Americans — several times US combat deaths in WWI — and it hit young adults hardest, this generation exactly.

  • Their twenties were legally dry

    Prohibition (1920–1933) landed just as the youngest of them hit drinking age — so the generation that wrote the best bar scenes in American literature did its drinking in speakeasies and Paris.

  • Radio arrived in their middle age

    KDKA in Pittsburgh made the first commercial broadcast in November 1920 — mass media as we know it began after they were grown.

The events that shaped the Lost Generation

  1. The Model T

    Ford's car for the multitude started replacing the horse while the generation was in school.

  2. World War I begins

    The July crisis detonated the war that would define — and name — the generation.

  3. America enters the war

    About 4.7 million Americans served; over 116,000 never came home.

  4. Influenza pandemic

    The deadliest pandemic of the modern era struck the same young adults the war had spared.

  5. Suffrage and Prohibition

    The 19th Amendment gave women the vote the same year the 18th shut the bars — both reshaping the generation's adult world.

  6. Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic

    The Spirit of St. Louis made a 25-year-old the most famous man alive and aviation the future.

  7. The Crash

    The party the survivors had thrown through the '20s ended in October 1929, with the generation entering middle age.

What things cost when the Lost Generation turned 25

The median member was born around 1892 and turned 25 in 1917 — the year America entered WWI. National statistics from that era are scarcer than for later generations; the figures below come from federal historical compilations, cited in the sources.

A dozen eggs

▼83% in real terms since 1917

1917
$0.48
In today's dollars
$12.50
June 2026
$2.14

US average retail price of strictly fresh eggs, 48.1 cents per dozen — BLS Bulletin 300, reproduced as series E 194 in Historical Statistics of the United States.

Median household income

▲298% in real terms since 1917

1917 (average annual earnings when employed)
$807
In today's dollars
$21,014
2024
$83,730

Average annual earnings of all employees when employed (Historical Statistics series D 722–727, Lebergott); $748 after allowing for unemployment. Lebergott's 1984 revision puts nonfarm earnings at $866.

Inflation adjustment uses BLS CPI-U annual averages (latest published month: 2026-06). Sources for every figure are listed in the sources section below.

Frequently asked questions

What years are the Lost Generation?

The Lost Generation was born roughly 1883 to 1900 — the cohort that reached young adulthood during World War I. The endpoints are approximate; formal generational bookkeeping didn't exist yet.

Is anyone from the Lost Generation still alive?

No. The youngest members, born in 1900, would be 125 in 2026; the world's last verified people born in the 1800s died in the late 2010s.

Why are they called the Lost Generation?

A Paris garage owner coined it as an insult about postwar youth; Gertrude Stein repeated it to Hemingway — 'You are all a lost generation' — and Hemingway used it as the epigraph of The Sun Also Rises (1926). 'Lost' meant disoriented and disillusioned, not missing.

Who were the famous Lost Generation writers?

The Paris expatriate circle: Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and T.S. Eliot among them, with Gertrude Stein as den mother. But the generation also produced Eisenhower, Chaplin, Babe Ruth, and Duke Ellington.

What war did the Lost Generation fight in?

World War I. About 4.7 million Americans served in 1917–1918, drawn almost entirely from this generation.

What generation came after the Lost Generation?

The Greatest Generation, born roughly 1901–1927 — their younger siblings and children, who fought World War II.

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Sources

Every fact on this page is verified against the sources below; each entry in the underlying data file carries per-fact source references.

  1. Lost Generation — Wikipedia
  2. Lost Generation — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. The Lost Generation: Who They Are and Why They're 'Lost' — FamilySearch
  4. Quote Origin: You Are All a Lost Generation — Quote Investigator
  5. Greatest Generation — Wikipedia
  6. Greatest Generation — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  7. Eleanor Roosevelt — Wikipedia
  8. Eleanor Roosevelt — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  9. Georgia O'Keeffe — Wikipedia
  10. Georgia O'Keeffe — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  11. Charlie Chaplin — Wikipedia
  12. Charlie Chaplin — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  13. Dwight D. Eisenhower — Wikipedia
  14. Dwight D. Eisenhower — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  15. Babe Ruth — Wikipedia
  16. Babe Ruth — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  17. F. Scott Fitzgerald — Wikipedia
  18. F. Scott Fitzgerald — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  19. Amelia Earhart — Wikipedia
  20. Amelia Earhart — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  21. Duke Ellington — Wikipedia
  22. Duke Ellington — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  23. Ernest Hemingway — Wikipedia
  24. Ernest Hemingway — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  25. The Kid (1921 film) — Wikipedia
  26. Nosferatu — Wikipedia
  27. Nosferatu — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  28. The Jazz Singer — Wikipedia
  29. The Jazz Singer — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  30. Livery Stable Blues — Wikipedia
  31. Jazz — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  32. Alexander's Ragtime Band — Wikipedia
  33. Irving Berlin — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  34. Cotton Club — Wikipedia
  35. The Sun Also Rises — Wikipedia
  36. The Great Gatsby — Wikipedia
  37. The Great Gatsby — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  38. The Waste Land — Wikipedia
  39. T.S. Eliot — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  40. 1916 — Model T Encyclopedia — Model T Ford Club of America
  41. 1916 Ford Model T Touring — Classic.com
  42. 1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus) — CDC
  43. Influenza pandemic of 1918–19 — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  44. Prohibition in the United States — Wikipedia
  45. Prohibition — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  46. KDKA (AM) — Wikipedia
  47. Radio — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  48. Model T — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  49. Ford Model T — Wikipedia
  50. World War I — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  51. World War I — Wikipedia
  52. United States in World War I — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  53. United States in World War I — Wikipedia
  54. Nineteenth Amendment — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  55. Charles Lindbergh — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  56. Charles Lindbergh — Wikipedia
  57. Stock market crash of 1929 — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  58. Wall Street crash of 1929 — Wikipedia
  59. Average Price: Eggs, Grade A, Large (APU0000708111) — BLS via FRED, St. Louis Fed
  60. Retail Prices, 1913 to December 1920 (Bulletin No. 300, Table A) — US Bureau of Labor Statistics, via FRASER
  61. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 — ch. E, series E 187–202 (retail food prices) — US Census Bureau
  62. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 — ch. D, series D 722–727 (average annual earnings) — US Census Bureau
  63. Wages and Working Conditions (Table 1, citing Lebergott 1984) — Econlib, Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
  64. Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2024 — US Census Bureau