The Sun Also Rises - by Ernest Hemingway (Paperback)

About the Book

The Sun Also Rises chronicles the experiences of Jake Barnes, a war veteran now working as a journalist in Paris in the aftermath of World War I, and his American and British expatriate friends--among them his occasional love interest, Lady Brett Ashley--as they search for meaning and purpose in their unmoored lives. The novel's plot climaxes in Spain, during the running of the bulls in Pamplona, in a series of events that illuminates both the strengths and shortcomings of the characters' lives.

Book Synopsis

The Sun Also Rises is one of the earliest and most important novels by Ernest Hemingway. The story tells of a group of British expatriates who travel to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. The story is based on the real experience in Hemingway's life. During his stay in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the Pamplona festival and fishing in the Pyrenees he lived through the similar events. The work investigates the themes of love and death, the revivifying power of nature, and the concept of masculinity. It also touches upon the topic of Lost Generation - young intelligent people that got decadent, dissolute, and irretrievably damaged by World War I. Yet, in this work, he proves they are still resilient and strong. This novel also demonstrates Hemingway's "Iceberg Theory" of writing. The surface of the plot is a turbulent love story between Jake Barnes--a man whose war wound has made him unable to have sex--and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Yet, the lower levels of the novels raise the questions of the lost generation and the relation between the man and nature.

About the Author

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was a novelist and short story writer whose economic and restrained writing style was enormously influential in twentieth-century fiction. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.