This image appeared on the front page of the Abilene Daily Record on November 11,1918. World War I ended and the nation worked to recover. The generation who came of age during World War I and into the Roaring Twenties was often called the Lost Generation because they tended to act recklessly. Hedonism and accumulation of wealth were the creed by which many of them lived.
Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many other writers and artists were part of this Lost Generation. For me, I always think of a bohemian lifestyle coming into fashion during this time period. I see the loss of traditional values and class structures of the nineteenth century and the rise of the middle class after World War I.
In my latest novel, my protagonist, Evie, reels from the loss of her brother in the war followed quickly by the death of her mother from the Spanish Flu. Evie epitomizes the Lost Generation. She rejects the strictures of her Victorian era father and wants a sense of purpose outside of marriage and family. It is this loss of values which leads her to go undercover as a magician’s assistant to solve a crime.
