The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
Summary
Jake Barnes, an American newspaperman living in Paris, was left sexually incapable by a wound from the First World War, a fact he can only ever refer to obliquely, and he loves Brett Ashley, a twice divorced Englishwoman who returns his feeling but cannot build a life around a man she cannot physically have. Hemingway follows their circle of expatriates, including the wealthy, insecure Robert Cohn, on a trip from the cafes of Paris to the bullfighting festival at Pamplona, where old grievances and new jealousies come to a head once Brett takes up with the young matador Pedro Romero in front of everyone who loves her. Cohn, humiliated and furious, beats Romero badly before the festival ends, and Brett eventually leaves the wounded, still triumphant matador in Madrid rather than let herself ruin him the way she has ruined the men before him. The novel closes with Brett and Jake together again in a taxi through Madrid, Brett saying wistfully that they could have had such a good time together, and Jake answering only, isn't it pretty to think so, a line that settles nothing and closes the book exactly where it began.
Hemingway strips his prose down to short declarative sentences and dialogue that carries far more weight than it appears to on the page, and the novel reads fast, its characters' drinking and bullfighting and wounded circling around each other propelled by a rhythm that feels almost effortless until a reader tries to describe what actually happened in any given scene. The restraint is the point; Hemingway trusts a reader to feel Jake's loss without ever being told directly what it costs him.
Hemingway's editor, Maxwell Perkins, chose the novel's original dust jacket art himself, a robed woman with her head bowed holding an apple, and said plainly that he had picked it to attract the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels, a piece of publishing calculation as blunt as anything in the book it was selling.
Historical Context & Significance
Reviewers split hard on publication. The New York Times praised its magnificent writing and lean, athletic prose, and Conrad Aiken singled out the dialogue in the New York Herald Tribune, while the Chicago Daily Tribune found the book merely unpleasant and the Cincinnati Enquirer complained it began nowhere and ended in nothing. Hemingway's own mother, Grace, wrote to him that she considered it one of the filthiest books of the year, a judgment son and mother never fully reconciled. The 1927 Pulitzer for the novel went to Louis Bromfield's Early Autumn, a book of New England gentility now almost entirely forgotten next to Hemingway's.
Hemingway would not win a Pulitzer of his own until The Old Man and the Sea more than a quarter century later, in 1953. The Sun Also Rises stayed in continuous print and grew instead through readers rather than prizes, its spare style shaping the sound of American fiction for decades and its Pamplona chapters doing more than any tourist board to make the running of the bulls there famous internationally.