The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway's first novel, opens on a wound that cannot be spoken of plainly. Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris, is in love with a woman named Brett Ashley. They both know they have no chance at a stable relationship. The reason sits unspoken beneath every scene: a war injury has left Jake unable to have sex. That single fact radiates through the entire book, shaping every drink poured, every punch thrown, and every Spanish afternoon spent watching a man dance with a bull.
Published in October 1926 by Charles Scribner's Sons, the novel arrived into a literary world still raw from World War I. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers would later call it "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work." Scholar Linda Wagner-Martin named it his most important novel. Yet when it first appeared, the reviews were mixed, Hemingway's own mother wrote him a letter calling it one of "the filthiest books of the year," and at least one reviewer declared that it "begins nowhere and ends in nothing."
How did a book so attacked by its earliest readers become a defining text of 20th-century American literature? And what was Hemingway actually trying to say when he moved his characters from the cafes of Paris to the bullrings of Pamplona? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer. The novel is not only a love story. It is a roman a clef drawn from a specific, chaotic week in Spain in 1925, a meditation on authenticity and work, and an argument about what the war had done to an entire generation.
Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona in 1923, with his wife Hadley Richardson. He had recently developed a passion for bullfighting, and the couple returned again in 1924, this time with Chink Dorman-Smith, John Dos Passos, and Donald Ogden Stewart.
The third visit, in June 1925, was the one that became a novel. Hemingway and Richardson stayed at the hotel of his friend Juanito Quintana and brought a new group of expatriates: Bill Smith, Hemingway's childhood friend from Michigan; Stewart again; the recently divorced Duff, Lady Twysden and her lover Pat Guthrie; and Harold Loeb, a fellow writer. The group quickly fell apart. Hemingway was attracted to Duff and jealous of Loeb, who had recently been on a romantic getaway with her. By the end of the week, the two men had a public fistfight.
Dominating the bullring that year was a young matador from Ronda named Cayetano Ordonez. His brilliance affected everyone watching. Ordonez honored Richardson by presenting her, from the bullring, with the ear of a bull he killed. Outside Pamplona, the fishing trip to the Irati River near Burguete in Navarre was spoiled by polluted water.
Hemingway had originally intended to write a nonfiction book about bullfighting. He changed course and recognized that the week's events gave him enough material for fiction. On the 21st of July, his birthday, a few days after the fiesta ended, he began writing. By the 17th of August he had fourteen chapters written, under the working title Fiesta. He finished the draft on the 21st of September 1925. That autumn, Hemingway's memories from more than one Pamplona trip found their way into the manuscript, which scholars believe explains why the novel's timeline points to both 1924 and 1925 without settling on either.
Hemingway had a three-book contract with Boni and Liveright, but he wanted to publish with Scribner's. The contract contained a termination clause: if Boni and Liveright rejected a single submission, the agreement ended.
In December 1925, Hemingway wrote The Torrents of Spring, a satirical novella mocking Sherwood Anderson's novel Dark Laughter. Anderson was one of Boni and Liveright's most profitable authors. Hemingway sent the novella to his publisher knowing they would be unamused. They rejected it immediately and terminated the contract. Within weeks Hemingway signed with Scribner's, who agreed to publish both The Torrents of Spring and all subsequent work.
During that same December in Schruns, Austria, Hemingway began revising the manuscript extensively. Pauline Pfeiffer arrived in January and, against Hadley Richardson's advice, urged him to sign with Scribner's. Hemingway traveled briefly to New York to meet the publishers. On his return, during a stop in Paris, he began an affair with Pauline. He returned to Schruns to finish the revisions in March.
By June, both Richardson and Pfeiffer were with him in Pamplona. When the group returned to Paris, Richardson asked for a separation and left for the south of France. Alone and depressed in Paris in August, Hemingway considered suicide and drafted a last will. He nevertheless completed the proofs and dedicated the novel to his wife and son. After the book appeared in October, Richardson asked for a divorce. Hemingway gave her the novel's royalties. Scribner's published the book on the 22nd of October 1926. Its first edition consisted of 5,090 copies at $2.00 each.
As a novice writer in Paris, Hemingway brought his short stories to Ezra Pound, who marked them in blue ink. Pound had a reputation as an unofficial minister of culture who served as a midwife for new literary talent. From Pound, Hemingway learned to use understatement, strip away sentimentalism, and present scenes without explaining their meaning.
F. Scott Fitzgerald told Hemingway to let the book's action play itself out among its characters. Wagner-Martin credits this advice with producing a novel without a central narrator, which she calls "a step ahead" as a modernist novel. When Fitzgerald advised trimming at least 2,500 words from an opening sequence that ran 30 pages, Hemingway wired the publishers to cut all 30 pages. The result was a novel without a focused starting point, which critics received as a modern perspective.
Hemingway also read the King James Bible aloud with his friend John Dos Passos and studied how its prose builds incrementally. Harold Bloom identifies parataxis as the technique that elevates Hemingway's sentences: the deliberate coordination of clauses without subordinating conjunctions, drawn from the Bible, Walt Whitman, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Scholar Zoe Trodd compares the effect to a multi-focal photographic reality. Biographer James Mellow writes that the bullfighting scenes read with the crispness of a newsreel.
Hemingway described the method as his iceberg theory: the writer could depict one thing while an entirely different thing occurred below the surface. William Balassi argues he applied this theory more fully in The Sun Also Rises than in any other work. The draft began in Pamplona, but Hemingway moved the opening to Paris because he believed the Montparnasse life was necessary as a counterpoint to Spain. He also credited the style sheet of The Kansas City Star, where he worked as a cub reporter, as the foundation for everything he needed to write.
The novel's two epigraphs contain its argument. The first alludes to the Lost Generation, a term coined by Gertrude Stein for the post-war cohort. The second is a long quotation from Ecclesiastes about generations passing while the earth endures. Hemingway told his editor Max Perkins that the book was not primarily about a generation being lost. Its true subject was that "the earth abideth forever." He believed the characters may have been battered but were not lost.
Americans had flooded Paris in the 1920s because the exchange rate was favorable. The Paris Tribune reported in 1925 that the city had an American Hospital, an American Library, and an American Chamber of Commerce, with as many as 200,000 English-speaking expatriates living there. Many writers were disenchanted with the United States, where they found less artistic freedom. Hemingway was in Paris during the period when James Joyce's Ulysses was banned and burned in New York.
Biographer Michael Reynolds argues that the novel is not about Parisian decadence but about the decline of American values, which Hemingway mourned. The moral center of that argument is Jake's relationship to work. The matadors and the prostitutes, who work for a living, are portrayed positively. Brett, who lives on other people's resources, represents what Hemingway called "the rotten crowd." It is Jake the working journalist who pays the bills repeatedly when those who can afford to pay do not. Reynolds sees the novel as a morality play, with Jake as the character who loses the most: his honor, faith, and hope over the course of the narrative.
Wagner-Martin points out that Hemingway's decision to change the working title from Fiesta to The Sun Also Rises was itself a moral statement, shifting the book away from spectacle and toward questions of endurance.
Spain held a particular place in Hemingway's imagination. He considered it the only European country "that hasn't been shot to pieces." He wrote that bullfighting was "a great tragedy and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," comparing a ringside seat at the corrida to watching war with no personal risk.
Critic Allen Josephs argues that the corrida is the novel's true center, and that every character is defined by how they respond to it. Brett seduces the young matador. Robert Cohn expects to be bored. Jake understands fully because he moves between both worlds: the inauthentic expatriates and the authentic Spaniards. The hotel keeper Montoya is the keeper of the faith. And Romero is the artist in the ring, innocent and technically perfect, the one who bravely faces death each afternoon.
Hemingway named his fictional matador after Pedro Romero, a real 18th-century bullfighter known for killing thousands of bulls in the most demanding style: having the bull impale itself on the sword while the matador stood perfectly still. Critic Keneth Kinnamon calls the fictional Romero the novel's only truly honorable character. Josephs notes that when Hemingway changed the name from the earlier draft version Guerrita, he also rewrote the killing scene to match the historical Romero's technique of recibiendo, receiving the bull.
The corrida is presented as an idealized drama in which the matador faces death and creates a moment Hemingway associated with existentialism or nada, nothingness, broken when the matador vanquishes death by killing the bull. The fishing interlude at the Irati River, as Harold Bloom notes, functions as an oasis outside linear time between the Paris and Pamplona sections, evoking the longstanding theme in American fiction of men escaping into wilderness, as seen in Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Thoreau.
Conrad Aiken wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that he did not know where to find better dialogue being written anywhere. Bruce Barton wrote in The Atlantic that Hemingway "writes as if he had never read anybody's writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself." But the Chicago Daily Tribune's reviewer was almost plain angry. The Dial thought the characters shallow and vapid. John Dos Passos, Hemingway's friend, published a hostile review in the New Masses and then privately sent an apology.
Still, the book sold. Two months after publication, 7,000 copies had moved and a second printing was underway. By 1928, after the publication of the short story collection Men Without Women, the novel was in its eighth printing. Young women across the country began wearing short hair and sweater sets like Brett Ashley and imitating her behavior. Male students at Ivy League universities wanted to model themselves on Hemingway's hero. Scribner's encouraged the celebrity and allowed Hemingway to become what biographer Carlos Baker called "a minor American phenomenon," to the point that his divorce from Richardson and marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer attracted media attention.
In 1927, two Broadway producers wanted to adapt the story for the stage but made no immediate offers. Hemingway told Max Perkins he would not sell the film rights for less than $30,000, money he wanted Richardson to have. He sold the rights to RKO Pictures in 1932, and the film appeared in 1956, with Tyrone Power as Jake, Ava Gardner as Brett, and Errol Flynn as Mike. The royalties went to Richardson.
The novel's stripped-down prose became a model for 20th-century American writing. Nagel writes that it "was a dramatic literary event and its effects have not diminished over the years." Harold Bloom locates the novel's permanent place in the American canon not in its characters, some of whom he thinks have not aged well, but in its formal achievement: the prose and the style. In May 2016, Simon and Schuster published a new Hemingway Library Edition that included early drafts, deleted passages, and the alternative titles Hemingway considered along the way to the finished book.
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Common questions
When was The Sun Also Rises first published?
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.
What is the plot of The Sun Also Rises?
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.
What is the Lost Generation in The Sun Also Rises?
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.
What is the iceberg theory in The Sun Also Rises?
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.
Who are the real people behind the characters in The Sun Also Rises?
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.
How was The Sun Also Rises received when it was published?
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.
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12 references cited across the entry
- 1BookEcclesiastes 1:3–5, King James Version
- 2"Yours Sincerely, Sinclair Levy"Barry Gross — December 1985
- 3BookErnest Hemingway’s: The Sun Also Rises: A CasebookMatts Djos — Oxford University Press — 2002-01-17