Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway sat down to write The Sun Also Rises on September 15,1925 and only six days later, the first draft was complete with the title of Fiesta. The first draft was almost a direct journalistic account of his experience in Paris and Spain, with the names of the characters corresponding to real people. After taking a break from it and writing The Torrents of Spring in order to break his contract with publisher Horace Liverwright, Hemingway returned to his first draft of The Sun Also Rises, making major changes including editing out the first two chapters and changing the order of the book to a straight chronology, and changing the names of the characters. In mid-October, 1926, his book reaached the bookstores after being published by Scribners and by Christmas, it was into its third printing. (Svoboda, 3)

Because The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway’s first novel, after making a promising entrance as a new author with In Our Time, it was reviewed critically by professionals and the general public. Although critics generally praised it as a book of “remarkable stature” (Svoboda 3), the shocking nature of the subject matter was probably the most determining factor in its bad reviews at that time. Hemingway presented a world of the post-war generation full of drinking, profanity, lack of moral values, sexual promiscuity, and lack of religious faith. (Reynolds 9) The intensity of the subject matter took many by surprise and was condemned, especially by the older generation of the 1920s: “The characters are a group of English and American young people who frequent the Paris quarter. They have been too strongly dosed with the more unpleasant kinds of reality...” (qtd. in...

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... The Sun Also Rises, including historical background and the different aspects of Hemingway’s writing style. He includes a wide range of outside sources, primary and secondary, in order to give a more comprehensive understanding of Hemingway’s work during the time it was published.

http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/virthem.htm

This website offered many useful links to articles, biographies, and websites for Ernest Hemingway. Under “virtual Hemingway,” I was able to found very useful links to articles I could use in my report.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/11/specials/hemingway-main.html

This website was an excellent source with a compilation of articles and critical essays from the New York Times on Ernest Hemingway. It offered the most essential reviews of Hemingway as well as accurate background information and pictures.