The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway’s first novel and portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early and enduring modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Despite its early criticisms, Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now “recognized as Hemingway’s greatest work,” and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by Scribner's. A year later Jonathan Cape published the novel in London under the title Fiesta. It remains in print.

     The novel is a roman à clef (a novel where the characters are based on real people). The characters were in Hemingway's circle and the action is based on real events, particularly Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the Pamplona festival and fishing in the Pyrenees. Hemingway investigates the themes of love and death, the revivifying power of nature, and the concept of masculinity. His spare writing style, combined with his restrained use of description to convey characterizations and action, demonstrates his coined “Iceberg Theory” of writing (a strategy of fiction writing where most of the story is hidden, much like an iceberg underneath the ocean.)