Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Hemingway: “Unless you
have geography,
background, you have
nothing.”
- George Antheil, Bad Boy of
Music, (New York:
Doubleday, Doran and
Co.,1945), p. 278
Hemingway during WWI
• Worked as ambulance
driver for the Red Cross in
Italy in 1918
• Wounded by shell and
machine-gun fire
• Admitted to hospital four
days before his
nineteenth birthday
• Falls in love with nurse,
Agnes von Kurowsky
Hemingway’s Circle
Ernest Hemingway with
Lady Duff Twysden,
Hadley Hemingway, and
three unidentified
people at a cafe in
Pamplona, Spain, July
1925
Hemingway and Truth
• Hemingway: “A writer’s job to tell the truth”.
• He believed that fiction could be “realer than real”.
Hemingway’s
truthful style
Beatnik’s
stream-ofconsciousness
Nonfiction
fiction of
Truman Capote
Romero’s truthful art
“Romero never made any contortions, always it
was straight and pure and natural in line. The
others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their
elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of
the bull after his horns had passed, to give a fake
look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked
turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling.
Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion.”
- Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises,
(London: Vintage, 2000 [1926]), p. 148
Gertrude Stein, ‘The Lost Generation’
Novel’s Epigraphs:
• Gertrude Stein: “You are
all a lost generation”
Gertrude Stein with
Hemingway’s son Jack in
Paris, 1924
• Ecclesiastes: “One
generation passeth away,
and another generation
cometh; but the earth
abideth forever . . . the
sun also ariseth”
Mythic parallels
Jake says, “I lay awake thinking and my mind jumping
around. . . . Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then
after a while it was better . . . and then I went to sleep”.
- Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, p. 27
Odysseus’s plight in the Odyssey: “My spirit was broken
within me, and I wept as I sat on the bed. . . . But when
I had my fill of weeping and writhing, then I made
answer”.
- Quoted in Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer As
Artist, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), p.
88