The Sun Also Rises

First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway’s first major novel and one of the defining works of the Lost Generation. The story follows American journalist Jake Barnes and a restless circle of expatriates from the cafés and bars of 1920s Paris to the bullfights and summer heat of Pamplona, Spain. At its centre is Jake’s complicated love for the magnetic Lady Brett Ashley, set against a world still reckoning with the disillusionment of the First World War.

Written in the spare, understated style that would become Hemingway’s signature, the novel explores love, friendship, masculinity, longing, and the search for meaning in a generation left unmoored by war. Paris appears not merely as a backdrop but as part of the novel’s rhythm: late dinners, crowded cafés, taxis through dark streets, and lives lived between one destination and the next. Its portrayal of the post-war expatriate world helped establish the enduring mythology of literary Paris and cemented Hemingway’s reputation as one of the most important American writers of his generation. Nearly a century later, The Sun Also Rises remains an essential novel of modern American literature and of Americans in Paris.

From the book

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

On The Sun Also Rises

“The discipline of the writing alone is astounding.”
— Lev Grossman, Library of America