First, academic works on generations are frequently focused on what Mannheim called “generation units,” rather than any large or representative section of a cohort of people, as the word “generation” implies. Wohl’s (1979) study of “the generation of 1914” is a study of a handful of European intellectuals whose writings were influenced by World War I. Similarly, Wyatt’s (1993) study of “the Vietnam generation” is a work of literary criticism of writers whose works bear the imprint of the turmoil of the late 1960s. Sociologists Whalen and Flacks (1989) have produced a detailed account of how the lives and attitudes of countercultural activists from the 1960s evolved over time, though to describe this group of activists as “the sixties generation”
