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Cover of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises

by Ernest Hemingway

Paris cafés, Pamplona bulls, and a crowd of the beautifully damaged — the novel that named a generation.

Published
1926
Pages
251
Setting
Paris, Spain
Shelf rating
4.8
Where to read:Your local bookstoreYour libraryRetailer links coming soon

The story, briefly

Spoiler-free

Jake Barnes, an American newspaperman carrying an unspeakable war wound, drifts through expatriate Paris in the orbit of Lady Brett Ashley — twice-divorced, magnetic, and impossible for him to have. When the crowd decamps to Pamplona for the fiesta, the drinking, the bullfights, and the jealousies come to a head. Nothing is stated; everything is felt. It remains the essential novel of the Lost Generation, written by the man Gertrude Stein aimed the phrase at.

Why we recommend it

  1. The iceberg, demonstrated

    Jake's wound, the war, the love story's impossibility — the novel's biggest facts are never stated directly, and land harder for it. This is the style that remade the American sentence.

  2. It's a roman à clef you can still hear gossiping

    Nearly everyone in it was a real person at real cafés — the 1925 Pamplona trip happened, feuds included. Few novels let you eavesdrop on an era this directly.

  3. The saddest funny book of its decade

    The dialogue sparkles, the drinking is comic, and underneath it all runs the flat despair of people who survived the war without surviving it. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?' still lands like a verdict.

What this book explores

  • DisillusionmentWhat's left when the big words — glory, honor, courage — stop working.
  • Exile & expatriationLeaving home to see it clearly, and the price of staying gone.
  • MasculinityCodes of conduct under pressure, and the men who fail them.
  • DesireAppetite in all its forms, indulged and paid for.

The real history

The fiesta was real: Hemingway's July 1925 Pamplona trip, with the real Lady Duff Twysden in tow, supplied the novel almost scene for scene — and ended most of the friendships in it.

Read the full story in the journal

Bring it to book club

  • Jake calls himself a bad Catholic and a good aficionado. What does the novel let him believe in, and does it hold?
  • Is Brett Ashley a free woman, a casualty of the war, or the novel's most honest character? Defend one reading.
  • The famous last line — 'Isn't it pretty to think so?' — answers which illusion, exactly?

A complete discussion guide is on our editorial calendar. Join the letter to hear when it ships.

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Cover of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

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Expatriate Paris again, five years and one economic collapse later — no fiesta money left, and no restraint either.