# Who is the greatest writer of the Lost Generation?

> Paris in the twenties held more talent per cafe table than most countries manage in a century. The famous names are here, and so are the ones their friends rated higher.

*By YPB Team · Published September 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-greatest-writer-of-the-lost-generation*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **F. Scott Fitzgerald** — score 1000/1000
   Chronicler of the Jazz Age whose The Great Gatsby became the era's defining American novel.
2. **Ernest Hemingway** — score 763/1000
   Novelist whose stripped-down sentences in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms reset American prose.
3. **William Faulkner** — score 624/1000
   Mississippi modernist whose Yoknapatawpha novels broke narrative time into competing voices.
4. **Erich Maria Remarque** — score 624/1000
   German veteran whose All Quiet on the Western Front voiced the same lost generation from the other trench.
5. **Djuna Barnes** — score 560/1000
   Expatriate novelist whose Nightwood turned the Paris demimonde into dense, hallucinatory prose.
6. **Kay Boyle** — score 560/1000
   Short-story writer and novelist of the Paris years, twice an O. Henry Prize winner.
7. **Ezra Pound** — score 485/1000
   Poet and relentless editor who shaped Imagism and pushed Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway into print.
8. **Zelda Fitzgerald** — score 485/1000
   Writer and painter whose novel Save Me the Waltz retold the marriage her husband was also mining.
9. **Ford Madox Ford** — score 397/1000
   Novelist of Parade's End and editor of the transatlantic review, the magazine that printed the expatriates.
10. **Sherwood Anderson** — score 397/1000
   Author of Winesburg, Ohio and the older mentor who opened doors for both Hemingway and Faulkner.
11. **Hart Crane** — score 291/1000
   Poet of The Bridge, whose ecstatic American epic ended with his suicide at thirty-two.
12. **John Dos Passos** — score 291/1000
   Author of the U.S.A. trilogy, who spliced newsreels and camera-eye montage into the American novel.
13. **E. E. Cummings** — score 291/1000
   Poet and ambulance-corps veteran whose typography and lowercase lines made verse look new.
14. **Gertrude Stein** — score 291/1000
   Paris salon host and experimental writer who coined the phrase 'lost generation' and mentored half of it.
15. **T. S. Eliot** — score 162/1000
   Poet of The Waste Land, the 1922 poem that gave post-war disillusion its permanent soundtrack.
16. **Thomas Wolfe** — score 162/1000
   Author of Look Homeward, Angel, whose torrential autobiographical novels needed editors to contain them.
17. **Archibald MacLeish** — score 162/1000
   Paris expatriate poet who later won three Pulitzers and ran the Library of Congress.

Tags: usa, books, classics, writers