Baby Busters

Baby Busters are the approximately 43 million Americans born from 1958 through 1968, all inclusive, owing to the fact that the U.S. birth rate (per 1,000 population) declined for eleven consecutive years after 1957. The name is intended to contrast with the term "Baby Boomer"; indeed, the central purpose of its usage appears to be to deny Boomer affiliation among those born from 1958 through 1964.

The first identification of baby busters in this context appears to have been made by anthropologist Marvin Harris (1927-2001) in his 1981 book America Now (later re-released under the title Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology of Daily Life). In 1987, the word twentysomething was coined, an apparent back-formation of Thirtysomething, the title of a then-popular Baby Boomer-themed television series. Douglas Coupland's groundbreaking 1991 novel Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture was dedicated to "the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s," and in his 2001 book, The Isolation Generation, Dean Anderson identifies a generation labeled the Pre-Lunar Space-Agers as having been born between the launch of Sputnik (October 4, 1957) and the Apollo 11 moon landing (July 20, 1969), thus making 1958 through 1968 the group's full birth years.