Ernest Hemingway, Nicholas Gaskill (Introducer)

The Sun Also Rises

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Summary

The Sun Also Rises is both a tragic love story and a searing group portrait of hapless American expatriates drinking, dancing, and chasing their illusions in post-World War I Europe. The man at its centre, world-weary journalist Jake Barnes, is burdened both by a wound acquired in the war and by his utterly hopeless love for the extravagantly decadent Lady Brett Ashley. When Jake, Brett and their friends leave Paris behind and converge in Pamplona for the annual festival of the running of the bulls, tensions among the various rivals for Brett's wayward affections build to a devastating climax.
Hemingway, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, has exerted a lasting influence on fiction in English. His signature prose style, tersely powerful and concealing more than it reveals, arguably reached its apex in this modernist masterpiece.

About the author

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) grew up in Illinois and came to Europe at the age of nineteen towards the end of World War I as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. Wounded by shrapnel after several months he was shipped home, but the war experience would shape his life and his fiction. In 1920, now married to the first of his four wives, he settled in Paris - already full of expatriate writers - and started to publish stories (In Our Time, 1925) and novels: The Sun Also Rises - published as Fiesta in Britain (1926); A Farewell to Arms (1929). He returned to America in 1928, where writing had to fit in between fishing and hunting trips. He was a journalist in Spain during the Civil War (inspiring For Whom the Bell Tolls), and afterwards set up home in Cuba with his third wife, fellow journalist Martha Gellhorn. In 1952 he published The Old Man and the Sea, his last major work of fiction. In increasingly bad physical health (exacerbated by alcoholism and depression), he left Cuba for Idaho (with wife number four) in 1960. He shot himself at their home the following year. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954; he is regarded as a leading modernist writer, known especially for his distinctive minimalist style.

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