Originally published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway’s first novel and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style.
A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. In his first great literary masterpiece, Hemingway portrays an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.
“The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost.” —The Wall Street Journal
Originally published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway’s first novel and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style.
A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. In his first great literary masterpiece, Hemingway portrays an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.
“The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost.” —The Wall Street Journal
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Overview
Originally published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway’s first novel and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style.
A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. In his first great literary masterpiece, Hemingway portrays an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.
“The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost.” —The Wall Street Journal
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780743564410 |
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Publisher: | Simon & Schuster Audio |
Publication date: | 10/17/2006 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
Pages: | 7 |
Sales rank: | 725,975 |
Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 5.88(h) x 1.20(d) |
Age Range: | 14 - 18 Years |
About the Author
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William Hurt was an Academy Award winning actor whose many films include A History of Violence, The Village, Body Heat, The Big Chill, Sunshine, Smoke Eyewitness, Broadcast News, Children of a Lesser God, and Kiss of The Spiderwoman. His stage credits include Henry V, Hamlet, Richard II, HurlyBurly, and My Life. He passed away in 2022 at the age of seventy-one.
Date of Birth:
July 21, 1899Date of Death:
July 2, 1961Place of Birth:
Oak Park, IllinoisPlace of Death:
Ketchum, IdahoRead an Excerpt
Chapter One
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly's star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn's distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.
I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly. Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had become of him.
Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him. He was married five years, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance of the estate having gone to his mother, hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife; and just when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature-painter. As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.
The divorce was arranged and Robert Cohn went out to the Coast. In California he fell among literary people and, as he still had a little of the fifty thousand left, in a short time he was backing a review of the Arts. The review commenced publication in Carmel, California, and finished in Provincetown, Massachusetts. By that time Cohn, who had been regarded purely as an angel, and whose name had appeared on the editorial page merely as a member of the advisory board, had become the sole editor. It was his money and he discovered he liked the authority of editing. He was sorry when the magazine became too expensive and he had to give it up.
By that time, though, he had other things to worry about. He had been taken in hand by a lady who hoped to rise with the magazine. She was very forceful, and Cohn never had a chance of not being taken in hand. Also he was sure that he loved her. When this lady saw that the magazine was not going to rise, she became a little disgusted with Cohn and decided that she might as well get what there was to get while there was still something available, so she urged that they go to Europe, where Cohn could write. They came to Europe, where the lady had been educated, and stayed three years. During these three years, the first spent in travel, the last two in Paris, Robert Cohn had two friends, Braddocks and myself. Braddocks was his literary friend. I was his tennis friend.
The lady who had him, her name was Frances, found toward the end of the second year that her looks were going, and her attitude toward Robert changed from one of careless possession and exploitation to the absolute determination that he should marry her. During this time Robert's mother had settled an allowance on him, about three hundred dollars a month. During two years and a half I do not believe that Robert Cohn looked at another woman. He was fairly happy, except that, like many people living in Europe, he would rather have been in America, and he had discovered writing. He wrote a novel, and it was not really such a bad novel as the critics later called it, although it was a very poor novel. He read many books, played bridge, played tennis, and boxed at a local gymnasium.
I first became aware of his lady's attitude toward him one night after the three of us had dined together. We had dined at l'Avenue's and afterward went to the Café de Versailles for coffee. We had several fines after the coffee, and I said I must be going. Cohn had been talking about the two of us going off somewhere on a weekend trip. He wanted to get out of town and get in a good walk. I suggested we fly to Strasbourg and walk up to Saint Odile, or somewhere or other in Alsace. "I know a girl in Strasbourg who can show us the town," I said.
Somebody kicked me under the table. I thought it was accidental and went on: "She's been there two years and knows everything there is to know about the town. She's a swell girl."
I was kicked again under the table and, looking, saw Frances, Robert's lady, her chin lifting and her face hardening.
"Hell," I said, "why go to Strasbourg? We could go up to Bruges, or to the Ardennes."
Cohn looked relieved. I was not kicked again. I said good-night and went out. Cohn said he wanted to buy a paper and would walk to the corner with me. "For God's sake," he said, "why did you say that about that girl in Strasbourg for? Didn't you see Frances?"
"No, why should I? If I know an American girl that lives in Strasbourg what the hell is it to Frances?"
"It doesn't make any difference. Any girl. I couldn't go, that would be all."
"Don't be silly."
"You don't know Frances. Any girl at all. Didn't you see the way she looked?"
"Oh, well," I said, "let's go to Senlis."
"Don't get sore."
"I'm not sore. Senlis is a good place and we can stay at the Grand Cerf and take a hike in the woods and come home."
"Good, that will be fine."
"Well, I'll see you to-morrow at the courts," I said.
"Good-night, Jake," he said, and started back to the café.
"You forgot to get your paper," I said.
"That's so." He walked with me up to the kiosque at the corner. "You are not sore, are you, Jake?" He turned with the paper in his hand.
"No, why should I be?"
"See you at tennis," he said. I watched him walk back to the café holding his paper. I rather liked him and evidently she led him quite a life.
Copyright © 1926 by Charles Scribner's Sons
Copyright renewed © 1954 by Ernest Hemingway
Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsIntroduction
Ernest Hemingway: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Maps
The Sun Also Rises
Appendix A: Reviews, Letters, and Hemingway’s Creative Process- 1. Allen Tate, “Hard-Boiled,” The Nation (15 December 1926)
- 2. From Edmund Wilson, “The Sportsman’s Tragedy,” The New Republic (14 December 1927)
- 3. Fanny Butcher, “Hemingway Seems Out of Focus in ‘The Sun Also Rises,’” Chicago Daily Tribune (27 November 1926)
- 4. Scribner’s advertisement for The Sun Also Rises, New York Times Book Review (23 January 1927)
- 5. From F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to Ernest Hemingway on The Sun Also Rises [early June 1926]
- 6. From Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)
- 7. From Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1932)
- 1. From Woodrow Wilson, “Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany” (2 April 1917)
- 2. Clifford Carleton, “He is keeping the World safe for Democracy” (1916–18)
- 3. From Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals,” The Seven Arts (June 1917)
- 4. From Ernest Hemingway, “Six Men Become Tankers,” The Kansas City Star (17 April 1918)
- 5. From Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933)
- 6. Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920)
- 7. Siegfried Sassoon, “Autumn” (1918)
- 8. From “Fifth Av. Cheers Negro Veterans,” The New York Times (18 February 1919)
- 9. From Major George A. Soper, “The Influenza Pneumonia Pandemic in the American Army Camps during September and October, 1918,” Science (8 November 1918)
- 10. Poster about influenza prevention, Illustrated Current News (18 October 1918)
- 11. From Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1932)
- 1. Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1920)
- 2. From Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction XXI,” Interview with George Plimpton, The Paris Review (Spring 1958)
- 3. From Elinor Glyn, The Philosophy of Love (1923)
- 4. From H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women (1922)
- 5. From F.P. Millard, What a Man Goes Through (1925)
- 6. From Elizabeth Benson, “The ‘Outrageous’ Younger Set,” Vanity Fair (September 1927)
- 7. From Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (1897; 1915)
- 1. Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1919)
- 2. From “1917–1927,” The Nation (6 April 1927)
- 3. “How Shall We Meet the Klan?,” The World Tomorrow (March 1924)
- a. Horace J. Wolf, Part I
- b. George E. Haynes, Part II
- c. From John McPike Keresey, Part III
- 4. From “May Jews Go to College?,” The Nation (14 June 1922)
- 5. Hallahan (cartoonist), “The Only Way to Handle It,” The Evening Bulletin (May 1921)
- 1. From Helen McAfee, “The Literature of Disillusion,” The Atlantic Monthly (August 1923)
- 2. “U.S. Citizens Give Self-Exile Causes,” The Washington Post (25 November 1928)
- 3. “Tourists Spend More Than Debt Payments Bring,” The Christian Science Monitor (1 June 1928)
- 4. From Ernest Hemingway, “American Bohemians in Paris a Weird Lot,” The Toronto Star Weekly (25 March 1922)
- 5. From Sisley Huddleston, “A Quarter That Tries” (1928)
- 6. “Corned Beef Hash Offered in Paris,” The Washington Post (9 December 1928)
- 7. “Paris Has Negro Colony, Drawn There By Jazz,” Daily Boston Globe (20 April 1928)
- 8. Langston Hughes, “To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” The Crisis (December 1925)
- 1. From Havelock Ellis, The Soul of Spain (1908; rpt. 1920)
- 2. From Clara E. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Spain! (1931)
- 3. From Ernest Hemingway, letter to Bill Horne (17–18 July 1923)
- 4. From Ernest Hemingway, “World’s Series of Bull Fighting a Mad, Whirling Carnival,” The Toronto Star Weekly (27 October 1923)
- 5. From Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Works Cited and Recommended Reading
Permissions Acknowledgements
What People are Saying About This
"Some of the finest and most restrained writing that this generation has produced."
New York World
"An absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heart-breaking narrative...It is a truly gripping story, told in lean, hard athletic prose...magnificent."
The New York Times
Reading Group Guide
The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway’s first novel and is one of his most enduring works. In spare, crisp prose, Hemingway tells the story of Jake Barnes, a journalist and American veteran of World War I who lives in Paris in the 1920s. Jake must reconcile his love for Englishwoman Brett Ashley with the new realities of his life. The Sun Also Rises captures both the disillusionment and resilience of a generation haunted by war and the universal challenges of unrequited love.
Topics and Questions for Discussion
1. Consider the novel’s first epigraph: “You are all a lost generation.” How do the characters in the novel seem lost? What can you extrapolate about the Lost Generation from Hemingway’s portrait?
2. The characters in The Sun Also Rises were based on people in Hemingway’s life. What responsibility does an author have—if any—when drawing inspiration from real people? How do you think relationships and life experiences inform the creative process?
3. Why do you think this novel is one of Hemingway’s most enduring works? What about the story continues to resonate with readers? In what ways does the novel still feel contemporary?
4. Consider Jake’s fishing trip to the Irati River. How is the natural world depicted in the novel? How does it echo and refract the larger themes of the book?
5. On page 9, Jake says: “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.” How does the novel depict bullfighting from both an aesthetic and philosophical perspective? How does Hemingway’s depiction of bullfighting function as social commentary?
6. Throughout the novel, Jake’s war injury is alluded to but never described directly. Why do you think Hemingway made this narrative choice?
7. Jake and Brett are both haunted by the atrocities of war. How do their coping mechanisms differ? In what ways do their survival strategies overlap?
8. When we first meet Brett at the dancing club (page 17), we see that she is “very much with” a group of men. How does Brett upend traditional gender roles?
9. The guiding principle of Hemingway’s writing was the “iceberg theory” or the “theory of omission,” in which deeper meaning is not stated explicitly but exists beneath the surface. How is Hemingway’s iceberg theory on display in this novel? Were there any omitted moments that you wish had been included?
10. Is The Sun Also Rises a tale of unrequited love? What does the novel have to say about the relationship between sex and intimacy?
11. On page 169, just before Pedro Romero’s bullfight, Brett says, “Funny . . . how one doesn’t mind the blood.” Why is Brett the perfect muse for Romero? What does the novel have to say about our cultural attitudes toward violence?
12. What do you make of the final scene? What glimmers of hope beckon within Jake’s and Brett’s revelations?
13. Why do you think Hemingway chose the title The Sun Also Rises?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Read Hemingway’s short story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” Do you see any thematic overlap? Why is the café milieu so important to Hemingway?
2. Watch Ken Burns’s documentary miniseries Ernest Hemingway. How does learning more about his life and hearing from other novelists inform your impression of Hemingway?
3. Brett Ashley, like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, embodies the flapper aesthetic. Read The Great Gatsby and talk about how Hemingway and Fitzgerald depict women of the era.
Introduction
Reading Group Guide for The Sun Also Rises
Introduction
Ernest Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. After graduation from high school, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he worked briefly for the Kansas City Star. Failing to qualify for the United States Army because of poor eyesight, he enlisted with the American Red Cross to drive ambulances in Italy. He was severely wounded on the Austrian front on July 9, 1918. Following recuperation in a Milan hospital, he returned home and became a freelance writer for the Toronto Star.
In December of 1921, he sailed to France and joined an expatriate community of writers and artists in Paris while continuing to write for the Toronto Star. There his fiction career began in "little magazines" and small presses and led to a volume of short stories, In Our Time (1925). His novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) established Hemingway as the most important and influential fiction writer of his generation. His later collections of short stories and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) affirmed his extraordinary career while his highly publicized life gave him unrivaled celebrity as a literary figure.
Hemingway became an authority on the subjects of his art: trout fishing, bullfighting, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing, and the cultures of the regions in which he set his work France, Italy, Spain, Cuba, and Africa.
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) earned him the Pulitzer Prize and was instrumental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.
Description
Jake Barnes, an American newspaperman emasculated by a wound suffered in Italy during World War I, is living and working in Paris in the expatriate community. He takes friends Bill Gorton, Lady Brett Ashley (whom Jake loves), her fiancé, Mike Campbell, and Robert Cohn (also in love with Brett) to Spain for trout fishing and bullfighting during the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona. Tensions mount among Campbell, Cohn, and Barnes over Brett and intensify as she falls in love with Pedro Romero, a nineteen-year-old bullfighter. At the end of the festival, Brett leaves with Romero, Bill returns to Paris, Mike goes to St. Jean de Luz, and Jake goes to San Sebastian for a respite soon ended when he receives a telegram from Brett. Jake goes immediately to her aid in Madrid, where he finds her momentarily remorseful and evading truth about Romero and her relationship with Jake.
Discussion Questions
1. When Jake Barnes rebuffs the prostitute Georgette because he is "sick," she says, "Everybody's sick. I'm sick, too" (p.23). Is Georgette's observation an appropriate description of the people in the novel? Why is Jake's emasculating wound such an effective symbol?
2. When Jake and Bill walk during the Paris evening looking at Notre Dame, watching young lovers, and savoring cooking smells, Jake asks whether Bill would like a drink. Why does Bill respond, "No...I don't need it" (p. 83)? Why does Jake say that for Cohn the Bayonne cathedral was "a very good example of something or other" (p. 96)?
3. Is Jake and Bill's fishing trip to Burguete relevant to the epigraph from Ecclesiastes? How do their conversations in Burguete differ from those they have back in Pamplona? How do Robert's, Mike's, and Brett's absences from the fishing trip set them apart from Jake and Bill? Why is the Englishman Harris included in the Burguete scene?
4. How would you describe Jake Barnes's relationship with Brett? Does he love her; understand her? Is his view of Brett constant? How does he see her at the close of the novel? What does he mean when he says, "Isn't it pretty to think so," when Brett tells him that they "could have had such a damned good time together" (p. 251)?
5. If Hemingway's novel is about "the lost generation," do we conclude that all five of the persons who have gone to Pamplona are lost? Is there evidence that moral or spiritual cleansing ever takes place in the novel?
After Reading the Novel
It would be difficult to overstate the remarkable influence of The Sun Also Rises upon its millions of readers. Not only did Hemingway's novel influence our prose and our conduct, it introduced Paris and Pamplona to many of us and made them so real that when we visit them, we feel as if we are returning for a closer look rather than seeing them for the first time. Several guides to Hemingway's Paris, complete with maps, photographs, and walking tours are in print which would provide your group with an opportunity to follow Jake Barnes's footsteps down the little side street Rue Delambre at the intersection of the Boulevard Raspail and Montparnasse to the Dingo Bar, where Jake and Brett had drinks, and Ernest Hemingway met Scott Fitzgerald for the first time in the spring of 1925. Guidebooks will also lead you through narrow streets of Pamplona where the bulls run and along Paseo Hemingway to the bullring, where a bust of the famous writer stands, bearing a statement of gratitude to him from the people of Spain.