Overview
Hemingway's 1926 debut novel follows a group of American and British expatriates from Paris to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. The narrator Jake Barnes, wounded in the First World War in a way that has left him impotent, loves Lady Brett Ashley, who loves him back but cannot sleep with him.
Hemingway wrote the novel in six weeks in Spain in 1925, drawing on a real trip to Pamplona with a group of friends the year before. It was his first novel, published in 1926 when he was twenty-seven. The book essentially invented an American prose style — the short declarative sentences, the submerged emotion, the refusal of rhetorical flourish — that would dominate literary fiction for decades.
Key Ideas
The Lost Generation
The novel crystallised the phrase Gertrude Stein had coined for Hemingway's cohort — young people shaped by the war into an unmoored adulthood.
Dialogue over description
Hemingway's famous iceberg prose is fully formed here; the book's emotional weight sits beneath unremarkable-looking exchanges.
Jake's wound
Jake's physical injury is both literal and symbolic — a generation's inability to continue the old forms of life after the war.
Pamplona as catharsis
The bullfighting chapters are Hemingway's argument for a certain kind of grace under pressure, which he would spend his career developing.
Brett as modern woman
Lady Brett Ashley is one of the first modern female characters in American fiction — sexually autonomous, morally serious, and unresolved.
Who should read this
Readers who want to see the invention of modernist American prose in progress. The book is short and deceptively simple; its influence on twentieth-century fiction is difficult to overstate. Particularly useful as a first Hemingway.
Who might skip it
Skip if you are uncomfortable with the period's casual antisemitism; the character Robert Cohn is treated with a kind of ugliness that reflects Hemingway's own prejudices of the period. Skip also if you want a plot in the conventional sense — the novel's movement is more atmospheric than narrative.
The verdict
The book that made Hemingway, and the one I'd still recommend first among his novels. The Pamplona chapters are some of the most vivid travel writing in American fiction, and the final exchange between Jake and Brett is one of the great closing moments in any novel. Short, perfect, and still shocking in small ways.
Isn't it pretty to think so?
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
If you liked this
A Farewell to Arms for Hemingway's war novel. A Moveable Feast for the memoir of the same years.