to note that he employs the term to speak of lost innocence—more precisely, of lost hopes and of the collapse of the very capacity for hope.

For those who lived through the cataclysm of the First World War, disillusionment was a collective experience—not just a function of the passage from youth to adulthood but of historical events that made the prewar world appear innocent and remote. For the first time, a whole period of historical time began to take on the qualities formerly associated with childhood. Since those who experienced the war most directly as soldiers, ambulance drivers, and military prisoners were literally children before the war, it was natural for them to play off postwar disillusionment against idyllic images of prewar childhood. The fortuitous effect of chronology strengthened the tendency to equate personal and collective history and thus to make the historical past an object of what was now called nostalgia. For the generation born around 1900, the century's youth, prematurely cut off by the war, coincided with their own, and it was easy to see the history of the twentieth century as the life history of their own generation.

It is no accident that the concept of the generation first began to influence historical and sociological consciousness in the same decade, the twenties, in which people began to speak so widely of nostalgia. Karl Mannheim published his influential essay, "The Problem of Generations," in 1927. As Robert Wohl shows in The Generation of 1914, those who were young at the time of World War I identified themselves self-consciously as a generation marked by history, one formed by the shared experience of this catastrophic event, and many of them projected their experience backward and reinterpreted all of history as a conflict of generations. In the United States, the war helped to crystallize the rebellion of "Young America," which had already begun to emerge in the prewar writings of critics like Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks. After the war, generational images of revolt became popularized in the so‐ called revolution in manners and morals led by "flaming youth."

The principal spokesman for this youth movement in the twenties, of course, was Fitzgerald, whose characterizations of the "jazz age" not only gave it a spurious unity but connected the history of his own generation with the twentieth-century history of the whole country. Here again, Brooks had anticipated this kind of thinking in the title of his literary manifesto of 1915, America's Coming-of-Age, but it was Fitzgerald, more

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