The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises is a novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926, following a group of expatriate American and British friends, narrated by the wounded First World War veteran Jake Barnes, as they drift between cafe life in Paris and the bullfighting festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain. Jake's unconsummated love for the promiscuous, twice-divorced Lady Brett Ashley, whose war-connected relationships and volatile engagement to the bankrupt Mike Campbell entangle the group alongside the writer Robert Cohn and the young matador Pedro Romero, drives a plot less concerned with external event than with the group's aimless, often self-destructive drinking and desire. Hemingway drew directly on his own 1925 trip to Pamplona and on friends who became models for the novel's characters, and wrote it in the spare, understated prose style that became his signature, built on concrete physical detail and dialogue rather than psychological explanation. Widely read as the definitive portrait of the Lost Generation, the young Americans and Europeans disillusioned by the First World War, The Sun Also Rises established Hemingway's reputation and remains one of the most influential American novels of the twentieth century for its style.