THE SUN ALSO RISES

Ernest Hemingway's great post-World War I novel, his first major work and the classic novel of the "lost generation," is a vivid exploration of the moral wasteland of Europe in the Twenties, and of the sterility and despair of postwar life. His hero, Jake Barnes, has suffered a war injury that has left him impotent. Hopelessly in love with the seductive and flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley, Jake leaves Paris to accompany Brett, her drunken fiancé, and an American boxer to Pamplona, watching helplessly as she falls for a young bullfighter. The expatriate crowd that Hemingway portrays so vividly passes their lives in an aimless alcoholic haze, against which the local fiestas and the running of the bulls seem, by contrast, full of vitality--a quality that is alien to them. The settings are romantic--the bull ring, the Paris streets, the bars and cafés and hotels--but Hemingway invests them all with a disillusion that undercuts the glamour of expatriate life. When THE SUN ALSO RISES was published, in 1926, Hemingway, at age 28, was established as a rising literary star. He wrote the first draft in an astonishing two months: a feat made possible, no doubt, by his close identification with his desperate hero and by his urgent need to tell the story--and to articulate his own melancholy feelings about his generation: where it came from and where it seemed to be going. It was with this novel that he found not only his distinctive themes, but also his spare, lyrical voice--a voice that understands the power of the apt detail but also knows, unerringly, what to leave out.