Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture - History

History

In 1987, Coupland (who was born in 1961) wrote an article for Vancouver Magazine in which he lamented the lack of realization for people within his own birth cohort. A year later, he received a $22,500 forward from St. Martin's Press to complete a handbook on the "generation" that he had outlined in the article. Coupland moved to the Mojave desert and the Coachella Valley in California to work on the book, which became a novel. This surprised the publishing company, who canceled the work, which was subsequently accepted by St. Martin's Press and published in March 1991.

The novel was a sleeper bestseller, growing in popularity after a slow start. Several terms from the book, such as McJob and Generation X, entered the popular vernacular, and Coupland was declared a spokesman for Generation X and lauded for having a feeling for the zeitgeist of the age.

The Generation X fanfare continued through the publication of his second novel, Shampoo Planet, the follow-up about a younger generation; it was also met with fanfare, and Coupland again called a spokesman for a generation.

However, Coupland constantly denied both the idea that there was a Generation X and that he was a spokesman.

This is going to sound heretical coming from me, but I don't think there is a Generation X. What I think a lot of people mistake for this thing that might be Generation X is just the acknowledgment that there exists some other group of people whatever, whoever they might be, younger than, say, Jane Fonda's baby boom. —Coupland, CNN, 1994

Coupland was offered large sums of money to act as a marketing consultant for the Generation X age group, but he turned them down, notably refusing to create an advertisement for Gap. "Generation X" nonetheless became a marketing force, as the name and ideas were used to market products and services, such as the clothing store Generation Next and the 1995 Citroën car model called "Le Generation X".

In 1994, before the publication of Microserfs, Coupland declared in Details magazine that Generation X was dead. He stated that the term had been co-opted as a marketing term, and that members of Generation X were relatively resistant to marketing ploys.

The biting, ironic tone of the novel and its pop culture allusions helped bring about a new era of transgressive fiction, including the work of authors Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk. Still in use are the term Generation X and its many derivatives, such as Generation Y. Many critics linked the novel to the popularity of grunge and alternative rock, but it makes no reference to grunge, and the song that is widely credited for boosting grunge into mainstream popularity (Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit") was released after the novel's publication.