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The exact time frame for this generation has always been pretty ambiguous. Shall we say people born between 1960 and 1980?

"Approximately" between 1960 and 1980? :)

(1960 would exclude, e.g., Roddy Doyle, who IMHO is pretty clearly Gen-X ...)

Also, Irvine Welsh was born in 1958.

Maybe Gen X is an attitude, more than an age range (i.e. F#&k the baby boomers! I'm doin' my own thing!)

Yep -- attitude plus, somewhat more vaguely, birth date/age group.

Jay McInerney was a bit too old.

But Hunter S. Thompson was definitely not an X'er. Too old even to be a Boomer (though attitude-wise I can see how you'd group him with them).

Part of the whole Gen X thing is that you missed out on the party the Boomers had in the 60's (a lot of which was about rebellion and individuality and 'fuck the system') and Thompson was in his own way part of all that.

And Tao Lin is generation Y... born in the 80's, heads a bunch of Digital Native writers.

Hunter S. Thompson is my parents' generation - he was born during the Depression.

These authors were writing books before Gen-X was even born:
- Aldous Huxley
- George Orwell
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Ken Kesey
- Albert Camus
- Daphne du Maurier

They definitely should be removed from this list.

I took the liberty of deleting any books that were published before 1960 (so not even in the lifetime of Gen-Xers):
- Animal Farm (author born 1903, book published 1945)
- Brave New World (author born 1894, book published 1932)
- Lolita (author born 1899, book published 1955)
- 1984 (author born 1903, book published 1949)
- Rebecca (author born 1907, book published 1938)

Very male list--not just male writers, but books about the male experience. Should be re-titled.

Maybe it would have been smarter to give a (rough) time period to be born in order to belong to 'generation X' ...

Gen X is generally considered to be those people born between 1965 and 1979.

@Susanna - Censored by GoodReads
I looked it up yesterday before I wrote my comment ;-) and it said 1961 to 1980 but it also gave a different years: 1956 - 1979. And 1961 to 1981 (the end date varies: 1981, 1983, 1985). And obviously your 1965 - 1979 comes from somewhere... Which is why I said a 'rough' time period for this lost generation ...

https://www.google.com/search?q=genea...

Ben makes sense in this case, as it would have been smarter, in my honest opinion, to put a date here ...

In the US, it's the Baby Boom which is most apparent demographically - 1946-1964. (1964 is the last "big" birth year - the drop-off in '65 is fairly steep.) Gen X's boundaries can be more fluid (especially as younger Gen Xers often don't self-ID as such) - but in the beginning we (I am one) were known as the "Baby Bust" for a reason. (We are, and always have been, a small generation, dwarfed by the Boomers ahead of us, and the Millenials behind.)

But yes, this list at its creation screamed out for qualifying dates.

I deleted the following books, which weren't even published in the right century to be Gen-X books:

- 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade
- The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen