Word for the Wise

February 03, 2009 Broadcast

Topic: Gertrude Stein

Yesterday we marked the birth of Ayn Rand; today we take note of the birth anniversary of Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein is remembered for musing "rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" and for her observation—when she tried to go home again to Oakland, California, where she'd spent years of her youth—that "there is no there, there."

Born just outside Pittsburgh in 1874, Stein found her true place in Paris. She remarked "America is my country, but Paris is my hometown." Admired (and derided) for the stream of consciousness writing she'd learned from William James, Stein welcomed members of what she dubbed "the lost generation"—Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway—to her salons.

As Stein used it, the lost generation named those disillusioned by the first world war and the social upheavals that followed. These cynics and hedonists rebelled against the old ways and old values they considered to have been discredited by the horrors they experienced (or heard about) in their youth.

But the phrase lost generation has long outlived its original application. The phrase has been used again and again in reference to various generations—not only American, not only European—to have been shaped by difficult and jarring experiences.

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