The Generations: Introduction

“You belong to it, too. You came along at the same time. You can’t get away from it,” Thomas Wolfe wrote (in You Can’t Go Home Again) about his own Lost generation. “You’re a part of it whether you want to be or not.” To Wolfe, as to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, and other writers of the 1920s, membership in that generation reflected a variety of mannerisms: weary cynicism at a young age, risk-taking, bingelike behavior, disdain for a pompous “older generation.” Wolfe’s peers stood across a wide divide from moralistic midlifers and across another divide from a new batch of straight-arrow kids. To “belong to it,” you had to come of age not long before World War I started. No one formally defined it that way; people just knew.

Wolfe’s Lost Generation literati never explained exactly how they identified their “generation.” But the question must be raised: In a world in which people are born every minute, how can social generations be located and their birthyear boundaries defined?

To answer this, you first have to determine the length of a generation. Here it helps to consider what happens when society encounters some great event that seems to change the course of history: History puts a different stamp on different peer groups according to their age-determined social roles. (For children this role might mean responding to an emergency by showing deference to elders and staying out of the way, while for young adults it might mean taking up arms and risking death to meet the enemy.) Thus, the length of a generation (in birthyears) should approximate the length of a phase of life (in years of age). Before the early nineteenth century, American generations should average about 25 years in length; since then, they should average about 21 years. Necessarily, these lengths can vary somewhat for each generation depending on the noise of history and the precise timing of great events.

To apply these lengths to real birthyears, you have to locate an underlying generational persona. Every generation has one. It’s a distinctly human—and variable—creation, with attitudes about family life, sex roles, institutions, politics, religion, lifestyle, and the future. A generation can think, feel, or do anything a person might think, feel, or do. It can be safe or reckless, individualist or collegial, spiritual or secular. Like any social category (race, class, or nationality), a generation can allow plenty of individual exceptions and be fuzzy at the edges. But unlike most other categories, it possesses its own personal biography. You can tell a lifelong story about the shared experiences of the Silent Generation in ways you never could for all women, all Hispanics, or all Californians. The reason, to quote Ferrari, is that a generation “is born, lives, and dies.” It can feel nostalgia for a unique past, express urgency about a future of limited duration, and comprehend its own mortality.

There is no fixed formula for identifying the persona of a real-life generation. But it helps to look for three attributes: first, a generation’s common beliefs and behavior; second, its common location in history; and third, its perceived membership in a common generation.