India, June 1 -- Sometime in the early 1920s, Gertrude Stein took her ancient Ford Model T from her home in Paris's Rue de Fleurus to a local mechanic. The car had been having starting trouble, and the young mechanic assigned to it was making heavy weather of it. Eventually, Stein deemed his efforts unsatisfactory and complained to his boss, who berated the boy, saying: "You are all a generation perdue." When Ernest Hemingway, a friend, next visited her home, she applied it to him and others of his generation. "All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation," she said. Hemingway, who understood the value of phrases like that, used it as an epigraph for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), which follows the l...