The Sun Also Rises, a 1926 novel by American Ernest Hemingway, 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. However, 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. It remains in print.
The basis for the novel was Hemingway's trip to Spain in 1925. The setting was unique and memorable, depicting sordid café life in Paris and the excitement of the Pamplona festival, with a middle section devoted to descriptions of a fishing trip in the Pyrenees. Hemingway's sparse writing style, combined with his restrained use of description to convey characterizations and action, demonstrates his "Iceberg Theory" of writing.
The novel is a roman à clef: the characters are based on real people in Hemingway's circle, and the action is based on real events. Hemingway presents his notion that the "Lost Generation"—considered to have been decadent, dissolute, and irretrievably damaged by World War I—was in fact resilient and strong. Hemingway investigates the themes of love and death, the revivifying power of nature, and the concept of masculinity.
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