Sun Also Rises, The, is a novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. The book is one of Hemingway’s earliest and finest works, published in 1926.
The Sun Also Rises follows the lives of a group of young Americans drifting through western Europe during the 1920’s. The characters are living with no direction and no true sense of purpose. They reflect the behavior of what Hemingway’s friend Gertrude Stein called the Lost Generation. The term refers to the generation of young American men and women who came to maturity during the postwar period that followed the end of World War I in 1918. Many were physically or psychologically damaged by the war, including Jake Barnes, whose war wound made him impotent (incapable of sexual intercourse). Hemingway implies that Jake’s condition reflects the symbolic condition of most of the characters in the novel.
The action in The Sun Also Rises takes place in Paris and northern Spain. The main characters are Barnes, an American newspaper correspondent and the story’s narrator; Lady Brett Ashley; Robert Cohn, a novelist; Jake’s friend Bill Gorton; and Michael Campbell, who plans to marry Brett after she divorces her current husband. Brett, who goes through a number of love affairs in the novel, runs off with Spanish bullfighter Pedro Romero, but she eventually returns to Michael at the end of the novel. Her real love is Jake Barnes, though Jake is unable to return that love in a way that either of them consider fulfilling.
The novel includes famous descriptions of bullfights and the “running of the bulls” at the San Fermín Festival in Pamplona, Spain (see Running of the bulls).
The novel’s title comes from a passage about the passing of the generations from the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:5) in the Bible. In the United Kingdom, where the book was published in 1927, its title is Fiesta.
See also Hemingway, Ernest; Lost Generation.
