The Sun Also Rises Discussion

Join us Monday, April 22 at 7:00 PM for a discussion of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. This will be the fourth and final discussion in our series “The Roaring Twenties.” Admission is free and open to the public, and copies of the book are available to borrow in advance. 

Published in 1926 and considered by many to be Hemingway’s greatest work, The Sun Also Rises is a novel about American and British expatriates in Paris and Spain. Based on real people and events, the novel tells the story of the doomed love of Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley. Today considered one of the most important and influential of Modernist novels, the book was immediately popular upon publication and has been continually in print since its first appearance.

Living and working in Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway had attended the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain where he had become fascinated with bullfighting. His experiences in Paris and Pamplona became the basis for The Sun Also Rises. Though the novel quoted Gertrude Stein’s observation that his was a “lost generation,” Hemingway rejected this notion, feeling that his characters, while “battered” by their experiences in World War I, were not lost.

The Sun Also Rises is also famous as one of the best examples of Hemingway’s spare style, his elimination of sentimentalism, and his “iceberg theory” of writing in which much of the story occurs beneath the surface of the narrative.