Ernest Hemingway's iconic first novel, published in 1926, tracks the Lost Generation of the 1920s from the nightclubs of Paris to the bullfighting arenas of Spain.
The Sun Also Rises is both a tragic love story and a searing group portrait of hapless American expatriates drinking, dancing, and chasing their illusions in post-World War I Europe. The man at its centre, world-weary journalist Jake Barnes, is burdened both by a wound acquired in the war and by his utterly hopeless love for the extravagantly decadent Lady Brett Ashley. When Jake, Brett and their friends leave Paris behind and converge in Pamplona for the annual festival of the running of the bulls, tensions among the various rivals for Brett's wayward affections build to a devastating climax. Hemingway, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, has exerted a lasting influence on fiction in English. His signature prose style, tersely powerful and concealing more than it reveals, arguably reached its apex in this modernist masterpiece.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, the child of a physician and a musician. After high school, he became a journalist with The Kansas City Star, before enlisting to be an ambulance driver in World War I. He returned home after a serious injury in 1918, but his military experience informed his fiction, especially A Farewell to Arms. He worked as a war correspondent for The Toronto Star during his first marriage, and over the next three marriages he would live in Paris, London, Key West, and Cuba. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two nonfiction titles. On safari in Africa in 1952 he survived two plane crashes, though his obituaries ran prematurely. He lived on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Two trunks of his early work from Paris reappeared in 1957, and inspired him to write his memoir A Moveable Feast. He eventually committed suicide in Idaho in 1961.
