Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Sun Also Rises was published in the United States on the 22nd of October 1926 by Charles Scribner's Sons. The first edition consisted of 5,090 copies sold at $2.00 each. A year later Jonathan Cape published it in the United Kingdom under the title Fiesta.
The novel follows Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris whose war wound has left him unable to have sex, and Brett Ashley, a twice-divorced Englishwoman with whom he is in love. The group of expatriates travels from Paris to the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, where drinking, jealousy, and fistfights surround Brett's pursuit of the 19-year-old matador Romero. The novel ends with Jake and Brett in a taxi, reflecting on what might have been.
The Lost Generation refers to the post-World War I cohort, a term coined by Gertrude Stein that Hemingway uses as the first of the novel's two epigraphs. Hemingway told his editor Max Perkins that the book was not primarily about a generation being lost but about the endurance expressed in the novel's second epigraph, a long quotation from Ecclesiastes. He believed his characters were battered but not lost.
Hemingway's iceberg theory, also called the theory of omission, holds that a writer can depict one thing while an entirely different thing occurs beneath the surface. Scholar William Balassi argues that Hemingway applied this theory more completely in The Sun Also Rises than in any other work, by deliberately leaving gaps and editing out explanations so that readers fill in the story themselves.
The novel is a roman a clef based on Hemingway's circle in the mid-1920s. Robert Cohn is based on Harold Loeb, a fellow writer who rivaled Hemingway for the affections of Duff, Lady Twysden, the real-life model for Brett Ashley. The young matador Romero is inspired by Cayetano Ordonez, the matador from Ronda whose brilliance dominated the 1925 Pamplona festival.
Reviews were mixed on publication. Conrad Aiken praised the dialogue in the New York Herald Tribune, and Bruce Barton admired its originality in The Atlantic. However, the Chicago Daily Tribune's reviewer was almost plain angry, The Dial found the characters shallow, and John Dos Passos published a hostile review in the New Masses before privately apologizing to Hemingway. Despite the criticism, the book sold well and went into multiple printings within two years.