Encountering Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises for a first-time reader today invites a wander through territories that can surprise with questionable bias and a legacy of dated intolerance. The opening lines, centered on the figure Robert Cohn, carry a hint of anti-Semitism that becomes more pronounced as the narrator nudges you toward a shared sense that there’s something ridiculous and overcompensating about a Jewish Ivy League boxer. And the later pages—sprinkled with dismissive remarks about gay men and with Brett’s unabashed sexual appetite treated as a slightly improper fault—don’t always align with contemporary sensibilities. In relation to the other major 1920s cornerstone, The Great Gatsby—even though we may at times romanticize it as a brutal American parable of self-fashioning, violence, and gangsterism—The Sun Also Rises carries its own barbed wire and thorns around its effects, detours that readers must hurdle to reach its core.
What is it, then, that has kept this book alive for a century and, perhaps more than any other work, has driven later writers to mine its influence for much of American fiction that followed? A fresh reader—speaking in a voice closer to Hemingway’s rhythm than they perhaps realize—posts on Reddit that it “Just felt like a boring travel vlog…Just people going to a place and doing a thing.” The remark isn’t wholly incorrect; indeed, in a sense that is not fully deliberate but entirely apt, it deserves a closer look. The book essentially chronicles going to places and doing things, and the clarity with which Hemingway stripped writing of overt allegory or clearly labeled social “comment”—and focused on the particulars of journeys and actions—may be the secret to its enduring originality.
As with any such assessment, close study helps. The plot is simple and not even a conventional plot: a troupe of expatriate Americans—and, crucially, a few Britons—who live and work in Paris in the era of the American expatriate surge in the 1920s decide to travel to Pamplona for the annual “running of the bulls” and the surrounding bullfights. This unfolds during the weeklong San Fermín festival, to borrow the British title Hemingway’s London publisher chose for the novel, at a moment when the festival had not yet become the global, commodified event it is today (and when Hemingway had not yet achieved the clout to determine his own titles). While there, the heroine, Lady Brett Ashley, embarks on an affair with the most romantic of the young Spanish bullfighters, discarding Cohn, the Jewish writer she had briefly favored—and, in effect, avoiding a genuine connection with the narrator, Jake, whom we’re meant to understand is the true object of her affection but who has been emasculated, or at least deprived of potency (the mechanics are not entirely clear) by a wound from the Great War.
Hemingway brought the stoical code back to life exactly by not articulating it as a self-conscious code. He gave it new life as a series of sensual experiences.
It is widely known as the witness and testament of the “lost generation.” The sense of what that term means—Hemingway’s mentor Gertrude Stein having first put it into words, not very poetically, at a gas station in rural France—is debated. The original French speaker (the patron of the gas station) may not have intended “lost” as aimless or searching for meaning but rather “missing.” Countless young Frenchmen died in the war; an entire generation was lost. Yet the phrase has settled into a second, more romantic implication—a generation that is “lost,” free to roam wherever they wish.
Hemingway clearly intends the second sense, while writing with an awareness of the first. These otherwise fortunate people, free to drink and wander through a Europe where the American dollar goes far, are lost—the war that erased millions also eroded the surviving generation’s confidence in the old order that had produced such devastation. The prewar prohibitions against “promiscuity” and the more blunt, unapologetic hedonism are shattered, while the foundations supposedly backing those taboos—the whole structure of bourgeois sacrifice, duty, and obligation—are overturned as well. The result is a cast of characters who can only…go to a place and do a thing and then go on to another…until the Depression follows the war and everyone returns home to brace for what’s next. The novel’s symbolism, including the hero’s emasculation, is meant to diagnose a era: the Great War unmoored the Western world; the surviving bees scatter across the fields seeking nectar in a world unsettled by another storm to come.
As the generous annotations of this edition reveal—and as Lesley M. M. Blume illuminated in her recent study of the real-world origins of the novel, Everyone Behaves Badly—the core contours of the book trace directly to Hemingway’s own experiences. Robert Cohn mirrors the editor and writer Harold Loeb; Brett Ashley is rooted in the British aristocrat Duff Twysden; and Bill is a blend of the writer Donald Ogden Stewart and Hemingway’s boyhood friend Bill Smith. How “close” the portraits are to the real people is a question scholars often debate, and actual readers rightly care about how far or near the creator strays from the life that inspired the work—the expressive effect depends on how far the author’s plug fits the home key, so to speak.
The research yields intriguing results. The real Brett Ashley did sleep with the real Robert Cohn, but apparently not with Hemingway himself—nor was her attachment to Hemingway as defining as Brett’s is to the unattainable Jake, a recurring fantasy in Hemingway’s own life. (Likewise, the real Catherine of A Farewell to Arms did not die in childbirth as in the novel, but disappeared after writing a farewell letter to the younger Hemingway and went off to nurse flu patients with a preferred lover.) Nor did the “real” Cohn possess the pugilistic pretensions that Hemingway heaps on his fictional stand-in.
And yet, for all that—despite the alluring distortions—the book endures on the page, in a way few American novels do. It would not have been read in its own era, nor in ours, as a portrait of a wasteland of numb feeling, as some other postwar works have suggested. Hemingway’s Europe reads as a place of vitality. The parodic image of the 1920s American in Paris—that mood of Gershwin’s An American in Paris that lingered into Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris—comes to vivid life here for the first time.
The revolt against abstraction…would remain the leitmotif of all acts of courage throughout the twentieth century.
Part of the book’s lasting appeal lies in the intensity of its code, the exact instructions for how to live, eat, and love that Hemingway dramatizes. In truth, Hemingway didn’t so much replace one social code with another as translate the prewar code into a fresh idiom that could feel plausible after the war. Jake’s stoicism—the novel’s central mood—essentially echoes the stoic code of the prewar British upper classes: never lament misfortune; withdraw into one’s inner life when pressed; savor hearty food and abundant drink; prioritize simple, sensual pleasures, especially those linked to rural pursuits like hunting and fishing, over verbal argument. It is the bullfighter’s code as well, or Hemingway’s rendition of it, and in another sense the projected code of the bull: life is inherently doomed; you fight the bull as long as you can; loss should be faced with quiet grace—the bearing in the face of death is everything. (Hemingway believed the bullfighter’s code and the bull’s code were the same, though of course the bulls did not get a vote.) That this is a renewed articulation of the class code destroyed by war—or left adrift and inebriated, like Lady Brett—and inaccessible to outsiders like the Cohns of this world is one of the book’s most poignant inner vibrations.
Yet Hemingway revived the stoic code not by presenting it as a formal doctrine but by animating it as a sequence of sensory experiences. We reread the novel now for its vivid physical detail—and we return to particular passages even as we reread the whole, precisely because the means by which the sensual effect is conjured on the page is so elusive, and so masterfully executed.
The key to that trick lies in what is left unsaid: how minuscule the touches are that convey so much lush evocation. I first read the book at twelve or thirteen, when I barely understood Jake’s predicament—but I distinctly recall being drawn to Brett’s balcony in her sweater. Yet when I revisit it after all these years, I can still picture the trout in the fishing stream stacked one atop another, and the innkeeper counting the wine bottles, and yes, it remains there: the simple, almost laughable thing that renders the scene complete. “We did not lose money on the wine, and the girl was shy but nice about bringing it. The old woman looked in once and counted the empty bottles.” That’s it! (But I had forgotten, a few lines earlier, that the narrator makes a deal with the innkeeper, the old woman, allowing them to drink as much as they want, which makes the payoff as clean as a one-liner.)
And I had forgotten that the trout lie on ferns—I once believed it was dill, a memory that now seems to have merged with the fern itself. (Such projections onto memory are how we recall works of art.) But reread it and you see how simply the means are by which the sensation is summoned: “I took the trout ashore, washed them in the cold, smoothly heavy water above the dam, and then picked some ferns, and packed them all in the bag, three trout on a layer of ferns, then another layer of ferns then three more trout, and then covered them with ferns. They looked nice in the ferns, and now the bag was bulky, and I put it in the shade of the tree.” Decades can pass between a first reading and a second, and the trout still look appealing, the bag remains heavy with its new burden, and the shade of the tree remains a welcome coolness.
Many influences press upon this achievement: Flaubert’s meticulous precision, Stein’s own ABC style, Hemingway’s adoption of a “newspaper” manner, and the painter Cézanne, whom Hemingway always credited as a guiding force, with his monosyllabic, unchanging crosshatch strokes that build a world and, no doubt, form the core of Hemingway’s perceptual grammar. Yet one should never overlook the moral energy behind these sensual simplifications.
The heart of the matter—the Rosetta Stone to all of Hemingway’s work—surely lies in a passage he wrote later, in A Farewell to Arms, reflecting on the Great War’s shadow across both novels:
. . . I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
When we read the great nineteenth-century novelists whom Hemingway studied, the reassuring confidence of generalization still delights us. (Someone once counted three per page in Tolstoy.) To create complexity, those masters turned to contradiction, which is the leitmotif of their work, as seen in the blazing opening lines of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities—or in all of Hugo’s novels. But in Hemingway, self-conscious contradiction and assured generalization disappear, leaving behind…things and places, the concrete names of rivers and the numbers of roads. Lev Grossman—a fervent admirer of The Sun Also Rises—recently highlighted a list of elements he loved in the work that consists entirely of the “interstitial, throwaway moments” of life, with nothing else in the novel:
…you’d still be left with one of the most overwhelmingly human books ever written. You’d be left with the pretty prostitute who smiles, showing her unexpectedly bad teeth; and the Spanish peasant who takes a little more than his fair share of the wine…and Jake promising to be there at five in the morning for the start of a bicycle race, then waking up the next morning after the cyclists have already been on the road for three hours.
The revolt against abstraction—even in the gentler form of confident generalization that once powered nineteenth-century novels—would continue to be a guiding motive for acts of courage throughout the twentieth century. It fuels works as varied as Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Simenon’s Inspector Maigret stories—the conviction that, in a world unsettled by abstract doctrine and inhuman ideology, the faces and voices of people are what endure.
The particulars in this book, however quirksome, are as redemptive as any American writer has pursued. We reread The Sun Also Rises for streets, flavors, trout, wine bottles, and for the unadorned truth of what war wounds look like—still in wonder, just as when we first regard Cézanne, and how such seemingly simple strokes can conjure a world so vivid, so present, so alive on the page. We return from rereading not to judge the author for his prejudices but to discern specifics—names and numbers of our own distinct experiences and referable things—as worthy of our fidelity as he was to his.
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Introduction by Adam Gopnik, from The Annotated Sun Also Rises: 100th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. Publication date, October 13, 2026, by Library of America. Copyright © Library of America. Used by permission.
