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States in October 1926 by the publishing house Scribner's. A year later, the London publishing house Jonathan

Capepublished the novel with the title of Fiesta. Since then it has been continuously in print.

Hemingway began writing the novel on his birthday (21 July) in 1925, finishing the draft manuscript barely two

months later in September. After setting aside the manuscript for a short period, he worked on revisions during the

winter of 1926. The basis for the novel was Hemingway's 1925 trip to Spain. The setting was unique and

memorable, showing the seedy café life in Paris, and the excitement of the Pamplona festival, with a middle

section devoted to descriptions of a fishing trip in the Pyrenees. Equally unique was Hemingway's spare writing

style, combined with his restrained use of description to convey characterizations and action, which became

known as the Iceberg Theory.

On the surface the novel is a love story between the protagonist Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has

made him impotent—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Brett's affair with Robert Cohn causes Jake

to be upset and break off his friendship with Cohn; her seduction of the 19-year-old matador Romero causes Jake

to lose his good reputation among the Spaniards in Pamplona. The novel is a roman à clef; the characters are

based on real people and the action is based on real events. In the novel, Hemingway presents his notion that the

"Lost Generation", considered to have been decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I, was

resilient and strong. Additionally, Hemingway investigates the themes of love, death, renewal in nature, and the

nature of masculinity.

Background

In the 1920s Hemingway lived in Paris, was foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and traveled to places

such as Smyrna to report about the Greco–Turkish War. He wanted to use his journalism experience to write

fiction, believing that a story could be based on real events when a writer distilled his own experiences in such a

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way that, according to biographer Jeffrey Meyers, "what he made up was truer than what he remembered".

With his wife Hadley, Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain in 1923, where he

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became fascinated bybullfighting. The Hemingways returned to Pamplona in 1924—enjoying the trip immensely

—this time accompanied by Chink Dorman-Smith, John Dos Passos, and Donald Ogden Stewart and his wife.

[6] The couple returned a third time in June 1925; that year they brought with them a different group of American

and British expatriates: Hemingway's Michigan boyhood friend Bill Smith, Stewart, Lady Duff Twysden (recently

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divorced), her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb. In Pamplona the group quickly disintegrated. Hemingway,

attracted to Lady Duff, was 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. Against this background was the influence of the

young matador from Ronda, Cayetano Ordóñez, whose brilliance in the bullring affected the spectators. Ordóñez

honored Hemingway's wife Hadley by presenting her, from the bullring, with the ear of a bull he killed. Outside of

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Pamplona, the fishing trip to the Irati River (near Burguete in Navarre) was marred by polluted water.

Hemingway intended to write a non-fiction book about bullfighting but thought that the week's experiences had

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presented him with enough material for a novel. A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday (21 July), he

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began to write the draft of what would become The Sun Also Rises, finishing eight weeks later. By 17 August,

with 14 chapters written and a working title of Fiesta chosen, Hemingway returned to Paris. He finished the draft

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on 21 September 1925, writing a foreword the following weekend and changing the title to The Lost Generation.

A few months later, in December 1925, the Hemingways left to spend the winter in Schruns, Austria, where

Hemingway began revising the manuscript extensively. Pauline Pfeiffer joined them in January and against

Hadley's advice urged him to sign a contract withScribner's. He left Austria for a quick trip to New York to meet with

the publishers, and on his return, during a stop in Paris, began an affair with Pauline, before returning to Schruns

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to finish the revisions in March. In June, he was in Pamplona with Hadley and Pauline. On their return to Paris,

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Hadley asked for a separation and left for the south of France. In August, alone in Paris, he completed the

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proofs, and dedicated the novel to his wife and son. After the publication of the book in October, Hadley asked

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for a divorce, and he gave her the royalties from The Sun Also Rises.

Plot summary

The protagonist of The Sun Also Rises is Jake Barnes, an expatriate American journalist living in Paris. Jake

suffered a war wound that has caused him to be impotent; the nature of his injury is not explicitly described in the

novel. He is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a twice-divorced Englishwoman. Brett, with herbobbed hair, embodies

the new sexual freedom of the 1920s, having had numerous love affairs. Book One is set in the Café society of

Paris. In the opening scenes, Jake plays tennis with his college friend Robert Cohn, picks up a prostitute

(Georgette), and runs into Brett and Count Mippipopolous in a nightclub. Brett and Jake leave together; in a taxi

she tells him she loves him, but they know they have no chance at a lasting relationship.

In Book Two Jake is joined by Bill Gorton, recently arrived from New York, and Brett's fiancé Mike Campbell, who

arrives from Scotland. Jake and Bill travel to Spain, where they meet Robert Cohn north of Pamplona for a fishing

trip. Cohn, however, leaves for Pamplona to wait for Brett and Mike. Cohn had an affair with Brett a few weeks

earlier and still feels possessive of her despite her engagement to Mike. Jake and Bill enjoy five days of tranquility,

fishing the streams near Burguete, after which they rejoin the group in Pamplona, where they begin to drink

heavily.

Cohn's presence is increasingly resented by the others, who taunt him with anti-semitic remarks. During the fiesta

the characters drink, eat, watch the running of the bulls, attend bullfights, and bicker with each other. Jake

introduces Brett to Romero at Montoya's hotel; she is smitten with the 19-year-old matador and seduces him. The

jealous tension among the men builds; Jake, Campbell, Cohn, and Romero each love Brett. Cohn, who had been

a champion boxer in college, has fistfights with Jake, Mike, and Romero, whom he injures. Despite the tension,

Romero continues to perform brilliantly in the bullring.

Book Three shows the characters in the aftermath of the fiesta. Sober again, they leave Pamplona. Bill returns to

Paris, Mike stays in Bayonne, and Jake goes to San Sebastián in northeastern Spain. As Jake is about to return to

Paris, he receives a telegram from Brett asking for help; she had left with Romero for Madrid. He finds her in a

cheap hotel, without money, and without Romero. She announces she has decided to go back to Mike. The novel

ends with Jake and Brett in a taxi speaking of the things that might have been.

Paris and the Lost Generation

The first book of The Sun Also Rises is set in mid-1920s Paris. Americans were drawn to Paris in the Roaring

Twenties by the favorableexchange rate, with as many as 200,000 English-speaking expatriates living there.

The Paris Tribune reported in 1925 that Paris had anAmerican Hospital, an American Library, and an American

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Chamber of Commerce. Many American writers were disenchanted with the US, where they found less artistic

freedom than in Europe. Hemingway had more artistic freedom in Paris than in the US at a period when Ulysses,

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written by his friend James Joyce, was banned and burned in New York.

The themes of The Sun Also Rises appear in its two epigraphs. The first is an allusion to the "Lost Generation", a

[note 2][26]

term coined byGertrude Stein referring to the post-war generation; the other epigraph is a long quotation

from Ecclesiastes: "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation

passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun

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goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." Hemingway told his editor Max Perkins that the book was

not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever." He thought the characters inThe

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Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.

Hemingway scholar Wagner-Martin writes that Hemingway wanted the book to be about morality, which he

emphasized by changing the working title from Fiesta to The Sun Also Rises. The book can be read either as a

novel about bored expatriates or as a morality tale about a protagonist who searches for integrity in an immoral

world. Months before Hemingway left for Pamplona, the press was depicting the Parisian Latin Quarter, where he

lived, as decadent and depraved. He began writing the story of a matador corrupted by the influence of the Latin

Quarter crowd; he expanded it into a novel about Jake Barnes at risk of being corrupted by wealthy and

inauthentic expatriates.

The characters form a group, sharing similar norms, and each greatly affected by the war. Hemingway captures

the angst of the age and transcends Brett and Jake's love story, although they are representative of the period:

Brett is starved for reassurance and love and Jake is sexually maimed. His wound symbolizes the disability of the

age, the disillusion, and the frustrations felt by an entire generation.

Hemingway thought he lost touch with American values while living in Paris, but his biographer Michael Reynolds

claims the opposite, seeing evidence of the author's midwestern American values in the novel. Hemingway

admired hard work. He portrayed the matadors and the prostitutes, who work for a living, in a positive manner, but

Brett, who prostitutes herself, is emblematic of "the rotten crowd" living on inherited money. It is Jake, the working

journalist, who pays the bills again and again when those who can pay do not. Hemingway shows, through Jake's

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actions, his disapproval of the people who did not pay up. Reynolds says that Hemingway shows the tragedy,

not so much of the decadence of the Montparnasse crowd, but of the decline in American values of the period. As

such the author created an American hero who is impotent and powerless. Jake becomes the moral center of the

story. He never considers himself part of the expatriate crowd because he is a working man; to Jake a working

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man is genuine and authentic, and those who do not work for a living spend their lives posing.

The corrida, the fiesta, and nature

[edit]

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway contrasts Paris with Spain, and the frenzy of the fiesta with the tranquillity of

the Spanish countryside. Spain was Hemingway's favorite European country; he considered it a healthy place, and

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the only country "that hasn't been shot to pieces". He was profoundly affected by the spectacle of bullfighting,

writing,

It isn't just brutal like they always told us. It's a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and

takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could. It's just like having a ringside seat at the

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war with nothing going to happen to you.

He demonstrated what he considered the purity in the culture of bullfighting—called afición—and presented it as

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an authentic way of life, contrasted against the inauthenticity of the Parisian bohemians. To be accepted as

an aficionado was rare for a non-Spaniard; Jake goes through a difficult process to gain acceptance by the

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"fellowship of afición".

The Hemingway scholar Allen Josephs thinks the novel is centered on the corrida (the bullfighting), and how each

character reacts to it. Brett seduces the young matador; Cohn fails to understand and expects to be bored; Jake