Synopsis
Ernest Hemingway's great post-World War I novel, his first major work and the classic novel of the "lost generation," is a vivid exploration of the moral wasteland of Europe in the Twenties, and of the sterility and despair of postwar life. His hero, Jake Barnes, has suffered a war injury that has left him impotent. Hopelessly in love with the seductive and flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley, Jake leaves Paris to accompany Brett, her drunken fiancé, and an American boxer to Pamplona, watching helplessly as she falls for a young bullfighter. The expatriate crowd that Hemingway portrays so vividly passes their lives in an aimless alcoholic haze, against which the local fiestas and the running of the bulls seem, by contrast, full of vitality--a quality that is alien to them. The settings are romantic--the bull ring, the Paris streets, the bars and cafés and hotels--but Hemingway invests them all with a disillusion that undercuts the glamour of expatriate life. When THE SUN ALSO RISES was published, in 1926, Hemingway, at age 28, was established as a rising literary star. He wrote the first draft in an astonishing two months: a feat made possible, no doubt, by his close identification with his desperate hero and by his urgent need to tell the story--and to articulate his own melancholy feelings about his generation: where it came from and where it seemed to be going. It was with this novel that he found not only his distinctive themes, but also his spare, lyrical voice--a voice that understands the power of the apt detail but also knows, unerringly, what to leave out.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1995-01-01 | | Edition Description: | Reissue |
| Size | | Length: | 251 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 7.2 oz |
Publisher's Note
Hemingway's first bestselling novel, the story of a group of Americans and English on a sojourn from Paris to Paloma, evokes in poignant detail, life among the expatriates on Paris's Left Bank during the 1920s and conveys in brutally realistic descriptions the power and danger of bullfighting in Spain.
THE SUN ALSO RISES was Ernest Hemingway's first big novel, and immediately established Hemingway as one of the great prose stylists, and one of the preeminent writers of his time. It is also the book that encapsulates the angst of the post--World War I generation, known as the Lost Generation. This poignantly beautiful story of a group of American and English expatriates in Paris on an excursion to Pamplona represents a dramatic step forward for Hemingway's evolving style. Featuring Left Bank Paris in the 1920s and brutally realistic descriptions of bullfighting in Spain, the story is about the flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley and the hapless Jake Barnes. In an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions, this is the Lost Generation.
Industry Reviews
"Hemingway doesn't fill out his characters and let them stand for themselves; he isolates one or two chief traits which reduce them to caricature. His perception of the physical object is direct and accurate; his vision of character, singularly oblique."
Nation - Allen Tate (12/15/1926)
"No amount of analysis can convey the quality of THE SUN ALSO RISES. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame....This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature."
New York Times (10/31/1926)
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