The Sun Also Rises

The novel was practically reported. In July 1925 Hemingway took his crowd — Lady Duff Twysden, Harold Loeb, Pat Guthrie, his boyhood friend Bill Smith, the humorist Donald Ogden Stewart — to the fiesta at Pamplona, watched the week collapse into jealousies over Duff, and started writing days later, on his twenty-sixth birthday, in Valencia. The first draft took about eight weeks, finished in Paris that September: the fastest sustained writing of his life, done while the wounds were still open.

The revision is one of the era's great craft stories. Fitzgerald read the opening — pages of chatty biography about Brett and Mike — and told him to cut it; Hemingway lopped the front of the book off in proof, so the novel now begins with Robert Cohn and trusts the reader with everything else. He set two epigraphs facing each other, Gertrude Stein's 'you are all a lost generation' against the wheel of Ecclesiastes, and let the title come from the second. Britain got it as Fiesta; Scribner published it in October 1926.

It made him famous and cost him nearly every friendship in it. Montparnasse read it as a directory — the quarter played spot-the-original for months — Duff and Loeb carried the portraits for the rest of their lives, and Loeb spent thirty years drafting his answer. Meanwhile the spare, repeating sentences remade American prose, and a generation of young women began talking like Brett. Few novels have ever been simultaneously such good gossip and such permanent literature.

Hemingway splits the novel into three parts, and the first belongs to Paris. Jake Barnes, an American newspaperman carrying a war wound that has made physical love impossible, drifts through the expatriate café world alongside Robert Cohn — a restless novelist who wants his life changed by South America, or by anything. Jake picks up a poule named Georgette out of loneliness and runs into Lady Brett Ashley at a dance club; in a taxi afterward the two of them turn over, one more time, the fact at the book's center: they love each other and it cannot work. Brett collects a devoted Greek count, deflects Cohn's sudden infatuation, and leaves town — to San Sebastián, it later emerges, with Cohn, a weekend that means nothing to her and everything to him. Cohn meanwhile disposes of Frances, the companion who managed three years of his life, absorbing her farewell evisceration in silence.

The second part moves to Spain. Jake and his friend Bill Gorton fish five perfect days at Burguete — the novel's one interval of peace — then rejoin the crowd in Pamplona for the fiesta: Brett, her bankrupt fiancé Mike Campbell, and Cohn, who follows Brett like a wronged creditor. As the fiesta detonates around them, the group turns on Cohn — Mike most viciously — while Jake introduces Brett to Pedro Romero, the nineteen-year-old matador who is everything the crowd is not. Brett, unable to stop herself, asks Jake to bring them together, and he does it, knowingly trading away the respect of the hotelier Montoya and the aficionados' world he treasures. Cohn, told where Brett has gone, knocks Jake and Mike down with his Princeton boxing and then beats Romero terribly — but cannot make the boy stay down or shake his hand, and leaves Pamplona weeping and finished with them all.

The next afternoon is the novel's climax: Romero, his face ruined, fights anyway and is magnificent — he kills the bull that had earlier gored a man to death in the morning's running, cuts the ear, and gives it to Brett. The aging Belmonte, jeered by a crowd that wanted his legend rather than his diminished self, watches the era pass to the boy. When the fiesta ends, the crowd scatters: Bill back to Paris, Mike broke to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Brett gone to Madrid with Romero. Jake, alone, retreats to San Sebastián to swim and recover — until Brett's telegram arrives.