Dyer holds a Ph.D. in English literature and has published extensively on fiction, poetry, film, and television. He is also a freelance university teacher, writer, and educational consultant. In the following essay, he explores the failure of Walter and Marit Such to engage in a meaningful way the attitudes and philosophies of a Lost Generation that they so clearly resemble.

When Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) drew upon one of poet Gertrude Stein’s (1874–1946) apocryphal sayings as the basis for his now-famous epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), it is doubtful that he was aware that the statement “You are all a lost generation” would come to define a whole generation and would continue to resonate with near-mythic power in American culture for decades to come. Referring to the generation that came of age in the United States during and following World...