NINETEEN-NINETY-FOUR WAS THE year I graduated from high school, and the year Kurt Cobain died. I remember coming home from school in suburban Illinois on that April afternoon, turning on the TV and seeing the MTV News anchor Kurt Loder report that the 27-year-old lead singer and guitarist for Nirvana had been found dead by suicide in Seattle. It was also the year the country watched live as the police chased O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco across the freeways of Los Angeles. On a slouchy brown couch in a wood-paneled basement, my boyfriend and I sat riveted, along with 95 million other Americans — ours was the last generation knit together by broadcast television — anxious to know how this strange, cinematic happening might end.

In 1994, Bill Clinton was president, the North American Free Trade Agreement had just taken effect and the figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the knee (an attack orchestrated by her rival Tonya Harding’s ex-husband) five weeks before the Winter Olympics. It was the year “Friends” and “ER” first aired, as did the lone season of the lovely but doomed “My So-Called Life.” “Natural Born Killers,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Mask,” “Dumb and Dumber” and “Legends of the Fall” were playing in theaters, and Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” — the black-and-white film about a pair of smartasses with dead-end jobs that would become a cult classic — debuted at Sundance. An astonishing number of consequential albums came out in 1994: Hole’s “Live Through This,” Nirvana’s “MTV Unplugged in New York,” Nas’s “Illmatic,” Liz Phair’s “Whip-Smart,” Tori Amos’s “Under the Pink,” Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” R.E.M.’s “Monster,” Beck’s “Mellow Gold,” Pavement’s “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain,” the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ready to Die,” Oasis’s “Definitely Maybe,” Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” and on and on.

Some of the generation’s most iconic creators reflect on how the cohort once synonymous with slacking came to leave such an indelible impression on the culture.I tell you all this in part because my memories of 1994 provide a neat time capsule of the era — the collective TV viewing, the after-school aloneness, the wood-paneled basement — but also to establish my Gen X cred: I was there for its watershed moments; I was steeped in its remarkable art and culture; I existed then, even if I don’t have any iPhone photos or Facebook posts to prove it.