Lady Chatterley's Lady - D.H. Lawrence

Lady Chatterley's lover much to my surprise is no porn. An erotic story, yes. But more than eroticism there is the inner revealings of what goes in a woman's head - and believe me, that is enough to make anyone crazy! 
Sir Clifford is one sturdy, showy and gruff character implying that only what goes in the mind is what counts - the glorification of man and mind. 
Connie out of pure luck meets her game keeper and their relationship evolves to wonderfully sexual nights and then Connie realizes that no, it is not all about the mind. The body is flesh and flesh yearns for its like. 
As the story was written in 1920 and it takes place even before that the context of a higher upper class woman leaving everything (husband, house, class and family name) all in name of true love and true sexual fulfillment was totally contradictory and against society and morality standards. 
In my personal opinion more than just the sexual connotation this book presents; the fact that it breaks many taboos and sheds light on how closed and hypocrite society at that time was is what made the book as shocking and offending that it became - more than all the sex that takes place in the book. 
The world is needing more books like this one. 

WIKIPEDIA on "Lady Chatterley's Lover:"

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed privately in Florence, Italy, with assistance from Pino Orioli; an unexpurgated edition could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960. (A private edition was issued by Inky Stephensen's Mandrake Press in 1929.)^[1] The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of then-unprintable words.

The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story.^[2] Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition. It has been published in three different versions.

Plot introduction

The story concerns a young married woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class husband, Clifford Chatterley, has been paralyzed due to a war injury. In addition to Clifford's physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple. Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The novel is about Constance's realisation that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. This realisation stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with Mellors, proving that love can only happen with the element of the body, not the mind.

[edit]Themes

In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence comes full circle to argue once again for individual regeneration, which can be found only through the relationship between man and woman (and, he asserts sometimes, man and man). Love and personal relationships are the threads that bind this novel together. Lawrence explores a wide range of different types of relationships. The reader sees the brutal, bullying relationship between Mellors and his wife Bertha, who punishes him by preventing his pleasure. There is Tommy Dukes, who has no relationship because he cannot find a woman whom he respects intellectually and, at the same time, finds desirable. There is also the perverse, maternal relationship that ultimately develops between Clifford and Mrs. Bolton, his caring nurse, after Connie has left.

[edit]Mind and body

Richard Hoggart argues that the main subject of Lady Chatterley's Lover is not the sexual passages that were the subject of such debate but the search for integrity and wholeness.^[3] Key to this integrity is cohesion between the mind and the body for "body without mind is brutish; mind without body...is a running away from our double being."^[3]Lady Chatterley's Lover focuses on the incoherence of living a life that is "all mind", which Lawrence saw as particularly true among the young members of the aristocratic classes, as in his description of Constance's and her sister Hilda's "tentative love-affairs" in their youth:

So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connexion were only sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax.^[4]

The contrast between mind and body can be seen in the dissatisfaction each has with their previous relationships: Constance's lack of intimacy with her husband who is "all mind" and Mellors's choice to live apart from his wife because of her "brutish" sexual nature.^[5] These dissatisfactions lead them into a relationship that builds very slowly and is based upon tenderness, physical passion, and mutual respect. As the relationship between Lady Chatterley and Mellors develops, they learn more about the interrelation of the mind and the body; she learns that sex is more than a shameful and disappointing act, and he learns about the spiritual challenges that come from physical love.

Neuro-psychoanalyst Mark Blechner identifies the "Lady Chatterley phenomenon" in which the same sexual act can affect people in different ways at different times, depending on their subjectivity.^[6] He bases it on the passage in which Lady Chatterley feels disengaged from Mellors and thinks disparagingly about the sex act: "And this time the sharp ecstasy of her own passion did not overcome her; she lay with hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis."^[7] Shortly thereafter, they make love again, and this time, she experiences enormous physical and emotional involvement: "And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass."^[8]

[edit]Class system and social conflict

Besides the evident sexual content of the book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover also presents some views on the British social context of the early 20th century. For example, Constance’s social insecurity, arising from being brought up in an upper middle class background, in contrast with Sir Clifford’s social self-assurance, becomes more evident in passages such as:

Clifford Chatterley was more upper-class than Connie. Connie was well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort, but still it. His father was a baronet, and his mother had been a viscount’s daughter.^[9]

There are also signs of dissatisfaction and resentment of the Tevershall coal pit’s workers, the colliers, against Clifford, who owned the mines. By the time Clifford and Connie had moved to Wragby Hall, Clifford's father's estate in Nottinghamshire, the coal industry in England seemed to be in decline, although the coal pit was still a big part in the life of the neighbouring town of Tevershall. References to the concepts of anarchism, socialism, communism, and capitalism permeate the book. Union strikes were also a constant preoccupation in Wragby Hall. An argument between Clifford and Connie goes:

‘’Oh good!, said Connie. “If only there aren’t more strikes!”

“What would be the use of their striking again! Merely ruin the industry, what’s left of it; and surely the owls are beginning to see it!”

“Perhaps they don’t mind ruining the industry,” said Connie.

“Ah, don’t talk like a woman! The industry fills their bellies, even if it can’t keep their pockets quite so flush,” he said, using turns of speech that oddly had a twang of Mrs. Bolton.^[10]

The most obvious social contrast in the plot, however, is that of the affair of an aristocratic woman (Connie) with a working class man (Mellors). Mark Schorer, an American writer and literary critic, considers a familiar construction in D.H. Lawrence's works the forbidden love of a woman of relatively superior social situation who is drawn to an "outsider" (a man of lower social rank or a foreigner), in which the woman either resists her impulse or yields to it.^[11] Schorer believes the two possibilities were embodied, respectively, in the situation into which Lawrence was born, and that into which Lawrence married, therefore becoming a favorite topic in his work.

Familiar, too, to much of Lawrence's work is the nearby presence of coal mining. Whilst it has a more direct role in Sons and Lovers and in Women in Love, it casts its influence over much of Lady Chatterley's Lover too. Lawrence's own father was a miner, and the author was intimately familiar with the region of the Derby/Notts coalfield, having been born at Eastwood, Nottingham. The significance of coal in the background to Lawrence's novels cannot be overstressed, when considering his treatment of social class issues. Involved with hard, dangerous and health-threatening employment, the unionised and self-supporting pit-village communities in Britain have been home to more pervasive class barriers than has been the case in other industries (for an example, see chapter two of The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell.) They were also centers of widespread non-conformist (Non-Anglican Protestant) religion, which tended to hold especially proscriptive views on matters such as adultery.

[edit]Controversy

An edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in Britain in 1932 by Martin Secker; reviewing it in The Observer, Gerald Gould noted that "passages are necessarily omitted to which the author undoubtedly attached supreme psychological importance - importance so great, that he was willing to face obloquy and misunderstanding and censorship because of them".^[12] An authorised abridgment of Lady Chatterley's Lover that was heavily censored was published in America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1928. This edition was subsequently reissued in paperback in America by Signet Books in 1946.

[edit]British obscenity trial

Main article R v Penguin Books Ltd.

When the full unexpurgated edition was published by Penguin Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. One of the objections was to the frequent use of the word "fuck" and its derivatives. Another objection involves the use of the word "cunt".

Various academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty". This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the United Kingdom. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".

The Penguin second edition, published in 1961, contains a publisher's dedication, which reads: "For having published this book, Penguin Books were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'Not Guilty' and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom."

In 2006, the trial was dramatised by BBC Wales as The Chatterley Affair.

[edit]Australia

Main article: Censorship in Australia

Not only was the book banned in Australia, but a book describing the British trial, The Trial of Lady Chatterley, was also banned. A copy was smuggled into the country and then published widely. The fallout from this event eventually led to the easing of censorship of books in the country, although the country still retains the Office of Film and Literature Classification. In early October 2009, the federal institution of Australia Post banned the sale of this book in their stores and outlets claiming that books of this nature don't fit in with the 'theme of their stores'.

[edit]Canada

Main article: Censorship in Canada

In 1945, McGill University Professor of Law and Canadian modernist poet F. R. Scott appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada to defend Lady Chatterley's Lover from censorship. However, despite Scott's efforts, the book was banned in Canada for 30 years due to concerns about its use of "obscene language" and explicit depiction of sexual intercourse. On 15 November 1960 an Ontario panel of experts, appointed by Attorney General Kelso Roberts, found that novel was not obscene according to the Canadian Criminal Code.^[13]

[edit]United States

In 1930, Senator Bronson Cutting proposed an amendment to the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which was then being debated, ending the practice of having U.S. Customs censor allegedly obscene books imported to U.S. shores. Senator Reed Smoot vigorously opposed such an amendment, threatening to publicly read indecent passages of imported books in front of the Senate. Although he never followed through, he included Lady Chatterley's Lover as an example of an obscene book that must not reach domestic audiences, declaring "I've not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley's Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!"^[14]

Lady Chatterley's Lover was one of a trio of books (the others being Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill), the ban on which was fought and overturned in court with assistance by lawyerCharles Rembar in 1959.^[15] It was then published by Grove Press, with the complete opinion by U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan, which first established the standard of "redeeming social or literary value" as a defense against obscenity charges.

A 1955 French film version based on the novel and released by Kingsley Pictures was in the United States the subject of attempted censorship in New York on the grounds that it promoted adultery.^[16] The Supreme Court held that the law prohibiting its showing was a violation of the First Amendment's protection of free speech.^[17]

The book was famously distributed in the U.S. by Frances Steloff at the Gotham Book Mart, in defiance of the book ban.

[edit]Japan

The publication of a full translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover by Sei Ito in 1950 led to a famous obscenity trial in Japan, extending from 8 May 1951 to 18 January 1952, with appeals lasting to 13 March 1957. Several notable literary figures testified for the defense, and the trial ultimately ended in a guilty verdict with a ¥100,000 fine for Ito and a ¥250,000 fine for his publisher.

[edit]India

In 1964, bookseller Ranjit Udeshi in Bombay was prosecuted under Sec. 292 of the Indian Penal Code (sale of obscene books)^[18] for selling an unexpurgated copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra (AIR 1968 SC 881) was eventually laid before a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India, where Chief Justice Hidayatullah declared the law on the subject of when a book can be regarded as obscene and established important tests of obscenity such as the Hicklin test.^[19]

The judgement upheld the conviction, stating that:

When everything said in its favour we find that in treating with sex the impugned portions viewed separately and also in the setting of the whole book pass the permissible limits judged of from our community standards and as there is no social gain to us which can be said to preponderate, we must hold the book to satisfy the test we have indicated above.

[edit]Cultural influence

In the United States, the free publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover was a significant event in the "sexual revolution". At the time, the book was a topic of widespread discussion and a byword of sorts. In 1965, Tom Lehrer recorded a satirical song entitled "Smut", in which the speaker in the song lyrics cheerfully acknowledges his enjoyment of such material; "Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?/I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley."

British poet Philip Larkin's poem "Annus Mirabilis" begins with a reference to the trial:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me) –

Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban

And The Beatles' first LP.

By 1976, the story had become sufficiently safe in Britain to be parodied by Morecambe and Wise; a "play what Ernie wrote", The Handyman and M'Lady, was obviously based on it, with Michele Dotrice as the Lady Chatterley figure. Introducing it, Ernie explained that his play was "about a man who has an accident with a combine harvester, which unfortunately makes him impudent".

[edit]Standard editions

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Lady Chatterley's Lover

• Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), edited by Michael Squires, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-521-22266-4.
• The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, edited by Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-521-47116-8. These two books, The First Lady Chatterley and John Thomas and Lady Jane were earlier drafts of Lawrence's last novel.
• The Second Lady Chatterley's Lover, Oneworld Classics 2007, ISBN 978-1-84749-019-3

Soon after the 1928 publication and suppression, an unexpurgated Tauchnitz edition appeared in Europe. Jock Colville, then 18, purchased a copy in Germany in 1933 and lent it to his mother Lady Cynthia, who passed it on to Queen Mary, only for it to be confiscated by King George V.^[20]

In 1946 an English hardcover edition, copyright Jan Förlag, was published by Victor Pettersons Bokindustriaktiebolag Stockholm, Sweden. It is marked "Unexpurgated authorized edition". A paperback edition followed in 1950.

[edit]Adaptations

[edit]Radio

Lady Chatterley's Lover has been adapted for BBC Radio 4 by acclaimed writer Michelene Wandor and was first broadcast in September 2006.

[edit]Film and television

Lady Chatterley's Lover has been adapted for film several times:

• In 1955, there was L'Amant de lady Chatterley, starring Danielle Darrieux; it was banned in the United States.
• In 1979, an Indian film in Malayalam titled Sharapancharam (Bed of Arrows), starring Jayan and Sheela and directed by Hariharan, was released whose story was loosely based on Lady Chatterley's Lover.
• 1981 film version by Just Jaeckin starring Sylvia Kristel and Nicholas Clay.
• In 1993 a lengthy television mini-series entitled Lady Chatterley directed by Ken Russell starring Joely Richardson and Sean Bean for BBC Television. This film incorporates some material from the longer second version John Thomas and Lady Jane.
• In 1998, director Viktor Polesný filmed a Czech television version entitled Milenec lady Chatterleyové with Zdena Studenková (Constance), Marek Vašut (Clifford) and Boris Rösner (Mellors).^[21]
• In 2006, the French director Pascale Ferran^[22] filmed a French-Language version with Marina Hands as Constance and Jean-Louis Coulloc'h as the game keeper, which won theCesar Award for Best Film in 2007. Marina Hands was awarded best actress at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.^[23] The film was based on John Thomas and Lady Jane, Lawrence's second version of the story. It was broadcast on the French television channel Arte on 22 June 2007 as Lady Chatterley et l'homme des bois (Lady Chatterley and the Man of the Woods).

Use of character

The character of Lady Chatterley appears in Young Lady Chatterley (1977), Lady Chatterly [sic] Versus Fanny Hill (1974) and Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterly [sic] (1967).

[edit]Theatre

Lawrence's novel was successfully dramatised for the stage in a three-act play by a young British playwright named John Harte. Although produced at The Arts Theatre in London in 1961 (and elsewhere later on), his play was written in 1953. It was the only D. H. Lawrence novel ever to be staged and his dramatisation was the only one to be read and approved by Lawrence's widow, Frieda. Despite her attempts to obtain the copyright for Harte to have his play staged in the 1950s, Baron Philippe de Rothschild did not relinquish the dramatic rights until his film was released in France.

Only the Old Bailey trial against Penguin Books for alleged obscenity in publishing the unexpurgated paperback edition of the novel prevented the play's transfer to the much biggerWyndham's Theatre, for which it had already been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain's Office on 12 August 1960 with passages censored. It was fully booked out for its limited run at The Arts Theatre and well reviewed by Harold Hobson, the prevailing West End theatre critic of the time.

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

Well where to start?
A friend told me I should read this book but what really made me want to pick it up in the bookstore and start flipping its pages was another book I read before given to me by my adoptive mother: "The Paris Wife".
This book made my curiosity spur and I felt like I needed to get to know this complex character and writer called Ernest Hemingway.
And so off to the bookstore I went. Book bought and now book read as well.
I feel like I have just started to peel off the first layer of Ernest and all that there is to him as this was the first book he wrote and the first one of his I read as well.
This book made me confused, lost and puzzled. All the characters are somewhat of a puzzle and the author lets slip by many characteristics which are imperious in you knowing what is going on...since he leaves these important pieces of information out you have no other option but to create them for yourself.
Brett, Jake, Cohn, Bill, Mike, Romero are all a mix of mixed and messed up characters whom weave themselves in your mind as you enter a bit farther and farther in their wild fiesta party days. Drunken days they are, filled with thrilling bull fights and hurt love feelings - but one thing is for sure: in in this book a story is told.   

Wikipedia on "The Sun Also Rises":

The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel written by American author Ernest Hemingway about a group of 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 enduringmodernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work",^[2] and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel.^[3] The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by the publishing house Scribner's. A year later, the London publishing house Jonathan Capepublished the novel with the title of Fiesta. Since then it has been continuously in print.

Hemingway began writing the novel on his birthday (21 July) in 1925, finishing the draft manuscript barely two months later in September. After setting aside the manuscript for a short period, he worked on revisions during the winter of 1926. The basis for the novel was Hemingway's 1925 trip to Spain. The setting was unique and memorable, showing the seedy 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. Equally unique was Hemingway's spare writing style, combined with his restrained use of description to convey characterizations and action, which became known as the Iceberg Theory.

On the surface the novel is a love story between the protagonist Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has made him impotent—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Brett's affair with Robert Cohn causes Jake to be upset and break off his friendship with Cohn; her seduction of the 19-year-old matador Romero causes Jake to lose his good reputation among the Spaniards in Pamplona. The novel is a roman à clef; the characters are based on real people and the action is based on real events. In the novel, Hemingway presents his notion that the "Lost Generation", considered to have been decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I, was resilient and strong. Additionally, Hemingway investigates the themes of love, death, renewal in nature, and the nature of masculinity.

Background

In the 1920s Hemingway lived in Paris, was foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and traveled to places such as Smyrna to report about the Greco–Turkish War. He wanted to use his journalism experience to write fiction, believing that a story could be based on real events when a writer distilled his own experiences in such a way that, according to biographer Jeffrey Meyers, "what he made up was truer than what he remembered".^[4]

Ernest Hemingway (with the mustache) with Lady Duff Twysden (wearing a hat),Hadley, and three men at a café inPamplona, Spain, July 1925.

With his wife Hadley, Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain in 1923, where he became fascinated bybullfighting.^[5] The Hemingways returned to Pamplona in 1924—enjoying the trip immensely—this time accompanied by Chink Dorman-Smith, John Dos Passos, and Donald Ogden Stewart and his wife.^[6] The couple returned a third time in June 1925; that year they brought with them a different group of American and British expatriates: Hemingway's Michigan boyhood friend Bill Smith, Stewart, Lady Duff Twysden (recently divorced), her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb.^[7] In Pamplona the group quickly disintegrated. Hemingway, attracted to Lady Duff, was jealous of Loeb, who had recently been on a romantic getaway with her; by the end of the week the two men had a public fistfight. Against this background was the influence of the young matador from Ronda, Cayetano Ordóñez, whose brilliance in the bullring affected the spectators. Ordóñez honored Hemingway's wife Hadley by presenting her, from the bullring, with the ear of a bull he killed. Outside of Pamplona, the fishing trip to the Irati River (near Burguete in Navarre) was marred by polluted water.^[7]

Hemingway intended to write a non-fiction book about bullfighting but thought that the week's experiences had presented him with enough material for a novel.^[6] A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday (21 July), he began to write the draft of what would become The Sun Also Rises, finishing eight weeks later.^[8] By 17 August, with 14 chapters written and a working title of Fiesta chosen, Hemingway returned to Paris. He finished the draft on 21 September 1925, writing a foreword the following weekend and changing the title to The Lost Generation.^[9]

A few months later, in December 1925, the Hemingways left to spend the winter in Schruns, Austria, where Hemingway began revising the manuscript extensively. Pauline Pfeiffer joined them in January and against Hadley's advice urged him to sign a contract withScribner's. He left Austria for a quick trip to New York to meet with the publishers, and on his return, during a stop in Paris, began an affair with Pauline, before returning to Schruns to finish the revisions in March.^[10] In June, he was in Pamplona with Hadley and Pauline. On their return to Paris, Hadley asked for a separation and left for the south of France.^[11] In August, alone in Paris, he completed the proofs, and dedicated the novel to his wife and son.^[12] After the publication of the book in October, Hadley asked for a divorce, and he gave her the royalties from The Sun Also Rises.^[13]

[edit]Publication history

Hemingway spent December 1925 inSchruns, Austria, with Hadley and Jack. During that period he wrote The Torrents of Spring.

Hemingway likely broke the contract with his publisher for the opportunity to have The Sun Also Rises published by Scribner's. In December 1925 he quickly wrote The Torrents of Spring—a satirical novella attacking Sherwood Anderson—and sent it to his publishersBoni & Liveright. His three-book contract with them included a termination clause should they reject a single submission. Unamused by the satire against one of their most saleable authors, Boni & Liveright immediately rejected it and terminated the contract.^[14] Within weeks Hemingway signed a contract with Scribner's, who agreed to publish The Torrents of Spring and all of his subsequent work.^{[15][note 1]}

Scribner's published the novel on 22 October 1926. Its first edition consisted of 5090 copies, selling at $2.00 per copy.^[16] Cleonike Damianakes illustrated the dust jacket with a Hellenistic design of a scantily robed woman, head bent, one hand holding an apple, thighs exposed. The title was decorated with apples—the intent was to present a quasi-sexual image tastefully.^[1] Two months later the book was in a second printing with 7000 copies sold. Subsequent printings were ordered; by 1928, after the publication of Hemingway's short story collection Men Without Women, the novel was in its eighth printing.^[17][18] In 1927 the novel was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape, title Fiesta, and the novel's two epigraphs were left out in the UK edition.^[19] In the 1990s, the British editions were titled Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises.^[20] Two decades later, in 1947, Scribner's released three of Hemingway's works as a boxed set, including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.^[21]

In 1983 The New York Times reported that The Sun Also Rises had been in print continuously since its publication in 1926, and was likely one of the most translated titles in the world. At that time Scribner's began to print cheaper mass-market paperbacks of the book, in addition to the more expensive trade paperbacks already in print.^[22] In 2006 Simon & Schuster began to produce audiobook versions of Hemingway's novels, including The Sun Also Rises.^[23]

[edit]Plot summary

The protagonist of The Sun Also Rises is Jake Barnes, an expatriate American journalist living in Paris. Jake suffered a war wound that has caused him to be impotent; the nature of his injury is not explicitly described in the novel. He is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a twice-divorced Englishwoman. Brett, with herbobbed hair, embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s, having had numerous love affairs. Book One is set in the Café society of Paris. In the opening scenes, Jake plays tennis with his college friend Robert Cohn, picks up a prostitute (Georgette), and runs into Brett and Count Mippipopolous in a nightclub. Brett and Jake leave together; in a taxi she tells him she loves him, but they know they have no chance at a lasting relationship.

In Book Two Jake is joined by Bill Gorton, recently arrived from New York, and Brett's fiancé Mike Campbell, who arrives from Scotland. Jake and Bill travel to Spain, where they meet Robert Cohn north of Pamplona for a fishing trip. Cohn, however, leaves for Pamplona to wait for Brett and Mike. Cohn had an affair with Brett a few weeks earlier and still feels possessive of her despite her engagement to Mike. Jake and Bill enjoy five days of tranquility, fishing the streams near Burguete, after which they rejoin the group in Pamplona, where they begin to drink heavily.

Cohn's presence is increasingly resented by the others, who taunt him with anti-semitic remarks. During the fiesta the characters drink, eat, watch the running of the bulls, attend bullfights, and bicker with each other. Jake introduces Brett to Romero at Montoya's hotel; she is smitten with the 19-year-old matador and seduces him. The jealous tension among the men builds; Jake, Campbell, Cohn, and Romero each love Brett. Cohn, who had been a champion boxer in college, has fistfights with Jake, Mike, and Romero, whom he injures. Despite the tension, Romero continues to perform brilliantly in the bullring.

Book Three shows the characters in the aftermath of the fiesta. Sober again, they leave Pamplona. Bill returns to Paris, Mike stays in Bayonne, and Jake goes to San Sebastián in northeastern Spain. As Jake is about to return to Paris, he receives a telegram from Brett asking for help; she had left with Romero for Madrid. He finds her in a cheap hotel, without money, and without Romero. She announces she has decided to go back to Mike. The novel ends with Jake and Brett in a taxi speaking of the things that might have been.

[edit]Major themes

[edit]Paris and the Lost Generation

Gertrude Stein in 1924 with Hemingway's son Jack. She coined the phrase "Lost Generation".

The first book of The Sun Also Rises is set in mid-1920s Paris. Americans were drawn to Paris in the Roaring Twenties by the favorableexchange rate, with as many as 200,000 English-speaking expatriates living there. The Paris Tribune reported in 1925 that Paris had anAmerican Hospital, an American Library, and an American Chamber of Commerce.^[24] Many American writers were disenchanted with the US, where they found less artistic freedom than in Europe. Hemingway had more artistic freedom in Paris than in the US at a period when Ulysses, written by his friend James Joyce, was banned and burned in New York.^[25]

The themes of The Sun Also Rises appear in its two epigraphs. The first is an allusion to the "Lost Generation", a term coined byGertrude Stein referring to the post-war generation;^{[note 2][26]} the other epigraph is a long quotation from Ecclesiastes: "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose."^[27] Hemingway told his editor Max Perkins that the book was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever." He thought the characters inThe Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.^[28]

Hemingway scholar Wagner-Martin writes that Hemingway wanted the book to be about morality, which he emphasized by changing the working title from Fiesta to The Sun Also Rises. Wagner-Martin claims that the book can be read either as a novel about bored expatriates or as a morality tale about a protagonist who searches for integrity in an immoral world.^[29] Months before Hemingway left for Pamplona, the press was depicting the Parisian Latin Quarter, where he lived, as decadent and depraved. He began writing the story of a matador corrupted by the influence of the Latin Quarter crowd; he expanded it into a novel about Jake Barnes at risk of being corrupted by wealthy and inauthentic expatriates.^[30]

Hemingway at home in his apartment on the Left Bank, Paris, 1924

The characters form a group, sharing similar norms, and each greatly affected by the war.^[29] Hemingway captures the angst of the age and transcends Brett and Jake's love story, although they are representative of the period: Brett is starved for reassurance and love and Jake is sexually maimed. His wound symbolizes the disability of the age, the disillusion, and the frustrations felt by an entire generation.^[29]

Hemingway thought he lost touch with American values while living in Paris, but his biographer Michael Reynolds claims the opposite, seeing evidence of the author's midwestern American values in the novel. Hemingway admired hard work. He portrayed the matadors and the prostitutes, who work for a living, in a positive manner, but Brett, who prostitutes herself, is emblematic of "the rotten crowd" living on inherited money. It is Jake, the working journalist, who pays the bills again and again when those who can pay do not. Hemingway shows, through Jake's actions, his disapproval of the people who did not pay up.^[31] Reynolds says that Hemingway shows the tragedy, not so much of the decadence of the Montparnasse crowd, but of the decline in American values of the period. As such the author created an American hero who is impotent and powerless. Jake becomes the moral center of the story. He never considers himself part of the expatriate crowd because he is a working man; to Jake a working man is genuine and authentic, and those who do not work for a living spend their lives posing.^[32]

[edit]Women and love

The twice-divorced Lady Brett Ashley represented the liberated New Woman and in her Hemingway created a character who reflected her time. Paris was a city where divorce was common and easy to be had in the mid-1920s.^[33] James Nagel writes that Hemingway created in Brett one of the more fascinating women in 20th-century American literature. Sexually promiscuous, she is a denizen of Parisian nightlife and cafés. In Pamplona she sparks chaos: in her presence, the men drink too much and fight; she seduces the young bullfighter; she becomes a Circe in the festival.^[34] Critics describe her variously as complicated, elusive, and enigmatic; Donald Daiker writes that Hemingway "treats her with a delicate balance of sympathy and antipathy."^[35] She is vulnerable, forgiving, independent—qualities that Hemingway juxtaposes with the other women in the book, who are either prostitutes or overbearing nags.^[36]

Nagel considers the novel a tragedy. Jake and Brett have a relationship that becomes destructive because their love cannot be consummated. Conflict over Brett destroys Jake's friendship with Robert Cohn, and her behavior in Pamplona affects Jake's hard-won reputation among the Spaniards.^[34] Meyers sees Brett as a woman who wants sex without love while Jake can only give her love without sex. Although Brett sleeps with many men, it is Jake she loves.^[37] Dana Fore writes that Brett is willing to be with Jake in spite of his disability, in a "non-traditional erotic relationship".^[38] Other critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Nina Baym see her as a supreme bitch; Fiedler sees Brett as one of the "outstanding examples of Hemingway's 'bitch women'".^[39][40] Jake becomes bitter about their relationship, as when he says, "Send a girl off with a man .... Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love."^[41]

Critics interpret the Jake–Brett relationship in various ways. Daiker suggests that Brett's behavior in Madrid—after Romero leaves and when Jake arrives at her summons—reflects her immorality.^[42] Scott Donaldson thinks Hemingway presents the Jake–Brett relationship in such a manner that Jake knew "that in having Brett for a friend 'he had been getting something for nothing' and that sooner or later he would have to pay the bill".^[43] Daiker notes that Brett relies on Jake to pay for her train fare from Madrid to San Sebastián, where she rejoins her fiancé Mike.^[44] In a piece Hemingway cut, he has Jake thinking, "you learned a lot about a woman by not sleeping with her."^[45] By the end of the novel, although Jake loves Brett, he appears to undergo a transformation in Madrid when he begins to distance himself from her.^[45] Reynolds believes that Jake represents the "everyman", and that in the course of the narrative he loses his honor, faith, and hope. He sees the novel as a morality play with Jake as the person who loses the most.^[46]

[edit]The corrida, the fiesta, and nature

Ernest Hemingway (in white trousers) fighting a bull in the amateur corrida at Pamplona fiesta, July 1925.

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway contrasts Paris with Spain, and the frenzy of the fiesta with the tranquillity of the Spanish countryside. Spain was Hemingway's favorite European country; he considered it a healthy place, and the only country "that hasn't been shot to pieces".^[47] He was profoundly affected by the spectacle of bullfighting, writing,

It isn't just brutal like they always told us. It's a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could. It's just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you.^[47]

He demonstrated what he considered the purity in the culture of bullfighting—called afición—and presented it as an authentic way of life, contrasted against the inauthenticity of the Parisian bohemians.^[48] To be accepted as an aficionado was rare for a non-Spaniard; Jake goes through a difficult process to gain acceptance by the "fellowship of afición".^[49]

The Hemingway scholar Allen Josephs thinks the novel is centered on the corrida (the bullfighting), and how each character reacts to it. Brett seduces the young matador; Cohn fails to understand and expects to be bored; Jake understands fully because only he moves between the world of the inauthentic expatriates and the authentic Spaniards; the hotel-keeper Montoya is the keeper of the faith; and Romero is the artist in the ring—he is both innocent and perfect, and the one who bravely faces death.^[50] Thecorrida is presented as an idealized drama in which the matador faces death, creating a moment of existentialism or nada (nothingness), broken when he vanquishes death by killing the bull.^[51]

Hemingway named his character Romero forPedro Romero, shown here in Goya's etching Pedro Romero Killing the Halted Bull (1816).

Hemingway presents matadors as heroic characters dancing in a bullring. He considered the bullring as war with precise rules, in contrast to the messiness of the real war that he, and by extension Jake, experienced.^[29] Critic Keneth Kinnamon notes that young Romero is the novel's only honorable character.^[49] Hemingway named Romero after Pedro Romero, an 18th-century bullfighter who killed thousands of bulls in the most difficult manner: having the bull impale itself on his sword as he stood perfectly still. Reynolds says Romero, who symbolizes the classically pure matador, is the "one idealized figure in the novel".^[52] Josephs says that when Hemingway changed Romero's name from Guerrita and imbued him with the characteristics of the historical Romero, he also changed the scene in which Romero kills a bull to one of recibiendo (receiving the bull) in homage to the historical namesake.^[53]

Before the group arrives in Pamplona, Jake, Bill and Robert take a fishing trip to the Irati River. As Harold Bloom points out, the scene serves as an interlude between the Paris and Pamplona sections, "an oasis that exists outside linear time." More importantly, on another level it reflects "the mainstream of American fiction beginning with the Pilgrims seeking refuge from English oppression"—the prominent theme in American literature of escaping into the wilderness, as seen in Cooper, Hawthorne,Melville, Twain, and Thoreau.^[54] Fiedler calls the theme "The Sacred Land"; he thinks the American West is evoked in The Sun Also Rises by the Pyrenees and given a symbolic nod with the name of the "Hotel Montana".^[39] In Hemingway's writing, nature is a place of refuge and rebirth, according to Stoltzfus, where the hunter or fisherman gains a moment of transcendence at the moment the prey is killed.^[51] Nature is the place where men act without women: men fish, men hunt, men find redemption.^[39] In nature Jake and Bill do not need to discuss the war because their war experience, paradoxically, is ever-present. The nature scenes serve as counterpoint to the fiesta scenes.^[29]

All of the characters drink heavily during the fiesta and generally throughout the novel. In his essay "Alcoholism in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises", Matts Djos says the main characters exhibit alcoholic tendencies such as depression, anxiety and sexual inadequacy. He writes that Jake's self-pity is symptomatic of an alcoholic, as is Brett's out-of-control behavior.^[55] William Balassi thinks that Jake gets drunk to avoid his feelings for Brett, notably in the Madrid scenes at the end where he has three martinis before lunch and drinks three bottles of wine with lunch.^[56] Reynolds, however, believes the drinking is relevant as set against the historical context of Prohibition in the United States. The atmosphere of the fiesta lends itself to drunkenness, but the degree of revelry among the Americans also reflects a reaction against Prohibition. Bill, visiting from the US, drinks in Paris and in Spain. Jake is rarely drunk in Paris where he works but on vacation in Pamplona, he drinks constantly. Reynolds says that Prohibition split attitudes about morality, and in the novel Hemingway made clear his dislike of Prohibition.^[57]

[edit]Masculinity and gender

Critics have seen Jake as an ambiguous code hero of Hemingway manliness. Critic Philip Young believes that Jake is an extension of Hemingway's autobiographical character Nick Adams, first introduced in his earlier short stories.^[58] However, Kathy and Arnold Davidson write in "Decoding the Hemingway Hero" that neither Jake nor the novel itself should be minimized to such an extent,^[59] for there are many ambiguities. For example, in the bar scene in Paris, Jake is angry at the homosexual men. Elliot believes that Hemingway viewed homosexuality as an inauthentic way of life, but he aligns Jake with homosexual men because, like them, he does not have sex with women. Jake's anger shows his self-hatred at his inauthenticity and lack of masculinity.^[60] His sense of masculine identity is lost—he is less than a man.^[61] Hemingway's writing has been called homophobic. For example, in the fishing scenes, Bill confesses his fondness for Jake but then goes on to say, "I couldn't tell you that in New York. It'd mean I was a faggot."^[62] Elliot wonders if Jake's wound perhaps signifies latent homosexuality, rather than only a loss of masculinity.^[63] Romero is the symbol of masculine identity; at the bullring Jake can only be a spectator.^[61] The Davidsons write that Romero reflects the code of masculinity in his bravery, and that Brett is attracted to him for this reason.^[64] Jake destroys the code hero Romero by bringing Brett to him, diminishing him and diminishing his own afición.^[65]

Critics have examined issues of gender misidentification that are prevalent in much of Hemingway's work. He was interested in cross-gender themes, as shown by his depictions of effeminate men and boyish women.^[66] In his fiction, a woman's hair is often symbolically important and used to denote gender. Brett, with her short hair, is androgynous and compared to a boy—yet the ambiguity lies in the fact that she is described as a "damned fine-looking woman". Her feminine traits are minimized and her masculine traits emphasized.^[67] Daiker speculates that Romero may have left Brett because he disliked her image and her short hair; she lacked the womanly qualities he wanted.^[68]

[edit]Anti-semitism

Mike lay on the bed looking like a death mask of himself. He opened his eyes and looked at me. 'Hello Jake' he said very slowly. 'I'm getting a little sleep. I've wanted a little sleep for a long time ....' 'You'll sleep, Mike. Don't worry, boy.' 'Brett's got a bullfighter,' Mike said. 'But her Jew has gone away .... Damned good thing, what?'

— The Sun Also Rises [69]

Hemingway has been called anti-Semitic, most notably because of the language he used and the characterization of Robert Cohn in the book. He often refers to Cohn as a Jew, and once as a 'kike'.^[70] Among Hemingway's friends, it was perhaps Harold Loeb, on whom Cohn's character is based, who lost the most in being immortalized in his friend's novel, as he was portrayed as the unlikeable Jew. As Susan Beegel writes about Cohn, "Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a Jew, not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character who is unattractive because he is a Jew."^[71]Shunned by the other members of the group, Cohn is characterized as "different", unable or unwilling to understand and participate in the fiesta.^[70] Cohn is never really part of the group—separated by his difference or his Jewishness.^[29] Reynolds writes that in 1925, Loeb should have declined Hemingway's invitation to join them in Pamplona. Before the trip he was Lady Duff's lover and Hemingway's friend; during the fiasco of the fiesta, he lost Lady Duff and Hemingway's friendship. Hemingway used Loeb as the basis of a character remembered chiefly as a "rich Jew".^[72] The Hemingway critic Josephine Knopf thinks Hemingway likely intended to depict Cohn as a "shlemiel" (or fool), but that Cohn is the least authentically presented character in the book, lacking any of the characteristics of a traditional "shlemiel."^[73]

[edit]Writing style

The novel is well known for its style, which is variously described as modern, hard-boiled, or understated.^[74] As a novice writer and journalist in Paris, Hemingway turned to Ezra Pound—who had a reputation as "an unofficial minister of culture who acted as mid-wife for new literary talent"—to mark and blue-ink his short stories.^[75] From Pound, Hemingway learned to write in the modernist style: he used understatement, pared away sentimentalism, and presented images and scenes without explanations of meaning, most notably at the book's conclusion, in which multiple future possibilities are left for Brett and Jake.^{[74][note 3]} The scholar Anders Hallengren writes that because Hemingway learned from Pound to "distrust adjectives", he created a style "in accordance with the esthetics and ethics of raising the emotional temperature towards the level of universal truth by shutting the door on sentiment, on the subjective."^[76]

F. Scott Fitzgerald told Hemingway to "let the book's action play itself out among its characters." Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin writes that, in taking Fitzgerald's advice, Hemingway produced a novel without a central narrator: "Hemingway's book was a step ahead; it was the modernist novel."^[77] When Fitzgerald advised Hemingway to trim at least 2500 words from the opening sequence, which was 30 pages long, Hemingway wired the publishers telling them to cut the opening 30 pages altogether. The result was a novel without a focused starting point, which was seen as a modern perspective and critically well received.^[78]

Each time he let the bull pass so close that the man and the bull and the cape that filled and pivoted ahead of the bull were all one sharply etched mass. It was all so slow and so controlled. It was as though he were rocking the bull to sleep. He made four veronicas like that ... and came away toward the applause, his hand on his hip, his cape on his arm, and the bull watching his back going away.

—bullfighting scene from The Sun Also Rises [79]

Wagner-Martin speculates that Hemingway may have wanted to have a weak or negative hero as defined by Edith Wharton, but he had no experience creating a hero or protagonist. At that point his fiction consisted of extremely short stories, not one of which featured a hero.^[29] The hero changed during the writing of The Sun Also Rises: first the matador was the hero, then Cohn was the hero, then Brett, and finally Hemingway realized "maybe there is not any hero at all. Maybe a story is better without any hero."^[80] Balassi believes that in eliminating other characters as the protagonist, Hemingway brought Jake indirectly into the role of the novel's hero.^[81]

As a roman à clef, the novel bases its characters on living people, causing scandal in the expatriate community. Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker writes that "word-of-mouth of the book" helped sales. Parisian expatriates gleefully tried to match the fictional characters to real identities. Moreover, he writes that Hemingway used prototypes easily found in the Latin Quarter on which to base his characters.^[82] The early draft identified the characters by their living counterparts; Jake's character was called Hem, and Brett's was called Duff.^[83]

Although the novel is written in a journalistic style, Frederic Svoboda writes that the striking thing about the work is "how quickly it moves away from a simple recounting of events."^[84] Jackson Benson believes that Hemingway used autobiographical details as framing devices for life in general. For example, Benson says that Hemingway drew out his experiences with "what-if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?"^[85] Hemingway believed that the writer could describe one thing while an entirely different thing occurs below the surface—an approach he called the iceberg theory, or the theory of omission.^[86]

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

—Hemingway explained the iceberg theory inDeath in the Afternoon (1932).[87]

Balassi says Hemingway applied the iceberg theory better in The Sun Also Rises than in any of his other works, by editing extraneous material or purposely leaving gaps in the story. He made editorial remarks in the manuscript that show he wanted to break from the stricture of Gertrude Stein's advice to use "clear restrained writing". In the earliest draft, the novel begins in Pamplona, but Hemingway moved the opening setting to Paris because he thought the Montparnasse life was necessary as a counterpoint to the later action in Spain. He wrote of Paris extensively, intending "not to be limited by the literary theories of others, [but] to write in his own way, and possibly, to fail."^[88] He added metaphors for each character: Mike's money problems, Brett's association with the Circe myth, Robert's association with the segregated steer.^[89] It wasn't until the revision process that he pared down the story, taking out unnecessary explanations, minimizing descriptive passages, and stripping the dialogue, all of which created a "complex but tightly compressed story".^[90]

Hemingway said that he learned what he needed as a foundation for his writing from the style sheet for The Kansas City Star,where he worked as cub reporter.^{[note 4][91]} The critic John Aldridge says that the minimalist style resulted from Hemingway's belief that to write authentically, each word had to be carefully chosen for its simplicity and authenticity and carry a great deal of weight. Aldridge writes that Hemingway's style "of a minimum of simple words that seemed to be squeezed onto the page against a great compulsion to be silent, creates the impression that those words—if only because there are so few of them—are sacramental."^[92] In Paris Hemingway had been experimenting with the prosody of the King James Bible, reading aloud with his friend John Dos Passos. From the style of the biblical text, he learned to build his prose incrementally; the action in the novel builds sentence by sentence, scene by scene and chapter by chapter.^[29]

Paul Cézanne, L'Estaque, Melting Snow, c. 1871. Writer Ronald Berman draws comparison between Cézanne's treatment of this landscape and the way Hemingway imbues the Irati River with emotional texture. In both, the landscape is a subjective element seen differently by each character.^[93]

The simplicity of his style is deceptive. Bloom writes that it is the effective use of parataxis that elevates Hemingway's prose. Drawing on the Bible, Walt Whitman and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway wrote in deliberate understatement and he heavily incorporated parataxis, which in some cases almost becomes cinematic.^[94] His skeletal sentences were crafted in response toHenry James's observation that World War I had "used up words", explains Hemingway scholar Zoe Trodd, who writes that his style is similar to a "multi-focal" photographic reality. The syntax, which lacks subordinating conjunctions, creates static sentences. The photographic "snapshot" style creates a collage of images. Hemingway omits internal punctuation (colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses) in favor of short declarative sentences, which are meant to build, as events build, to create a sense of the whole. He also uses techniques analogous to cinema, such as cutting quickly from one scene to the next, or splicing one scene into another. Intentional omissions allow the reader to fill the gap as though responding to instructions from the author and create three-dimensional prose.^[95] Biographer James Mellow writes that the bullfighting scenes are presented with a crispness and clarity that evoke the sense of a newsreel.^[96]

Hemingway also uses color and visual art techniques to convey emotional range in his descriptions of the Irati River. In Translating Modernism: Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Ronald Berman compares Hemingway's treatment of landscape with that of the post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. During a 1949 interview, Hemingway told Lillian Ross that he learned from Cézanne how to "make a landscape". In comparing writing to painting he told her, "This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and woods, and the rocks we have to climb over."^[97] The landscape is seen subjectively—the viewpoint of the observer is paramount.^[98] To Jake, landscape "meant a search for a solid form .... not existentially present in [his] life in Paris".^[98]

[edit]Reception

Hemingway's first novel was arguably his best and most important and came to be seen as an iconic modernist novel, although Reynolds emphasizes that Hemingway was not philosophically a modernist.^[99] In the book, his characters epitomized the post-war expatriate generation for future generations.^[100] He had received good reviews for his volume of short stories, In Our Time, of which Edmund Wilson wrote, "Hemingway's prose was of the first distinction". Wilson's comments were enough to bring attention to the young writer.^[101]

No amount of analysis can convey the quality ofThe Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. Mr. Hemingway knows how not only to make words be specific but how to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts. It is magnificent writing.

—The New York Times review of The Sun Also Rises, 31 October 1926.[102]

Good reviews came in from many major publications. Conrad Aiken wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, "If there is a better dialogue to be written today I do not know where to find it"; and Bruce Barton wrote in The Atlantic that Hemingway "writes as if he had never read anybody's writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself", and that the characters "are amazingly real and alive".^[17] Many reviewers, among them H.L. Mencken, praised Hemingway's style, use of understatement, and tight writing.^[103]

Other critics, however, disliked the novel. The Nation's critic believed Hemingway's hard-boiled style was better suited to the short stories published in In Our Time than his novel. Writing in the New Masses, Hemingway's friend John Dos Passos asked: "What's the matter with American writing these days? .... The few unsad young men of this lost generation will have to look for another way of finding themselves than the one indicated here." Privately he wrote Hemingway an apology for the review.^[17] The reviewer for the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote of the novel, "The Sun Also Rises is the kind of book that makes this reviewer at least almost plain angry."^[104] Some reviewers disliked the characters, among them the reviewer for The Dial, who thought the characters were shallow and vapid; and The Nation and Atheneum deemed the characters boring and the novel unimportant.^[103] The reviewer for The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote of the book that it "begins nowhere and ends in nothing".^[1]

Hemingway's family hated it. The author's mother, Grace Hemingway, distressed that she could not face the criticism at her local book study class—where it was said that her son was "prostituting a great ability .... to the lowest uses"—expressed her displeasure in a letter to him:

The critics seem to be full of praise for your style and ability to draw word pictures but the decent ones always regret that you should use such great gifts in perpetuating the lives and habits of so degraded a strata of humanity .... It is a doubtful honor to produce one of the filthiest books of the year .... What is the matter? Have you ceased to be interested in nobility, honor and fineness in life? .... Surely you have other words in your vocabulary than "damn" and "bitch"—Every page fills me with a sick loathing.^[105]

The book sold well and young women began to emulate Brett and male students at Ivy League universities wanted to become "Hemingway heroes". Scribner's encouraged the publicity and allowed Hemingway to "become a minor American phenomenon"—a celebrity to the point that his divorce from Hadley and marriage to Pauline attracted media attention.^[106]

Reynolds believes The Sun Also Rises could only have been written in 1925: it perfectly captured the period between World War I and the Great Depression, and immortalized a group of characters.^[107] In the years since its publication, the novel has been criticized for its anti-Semitism, as expressed in the characterization of Robert Cohn. Reynolds explains that although the publishers complained to Hemingway about his description of bulls, they allowed his use of Jewish epithets, which showed the degree to which anti-Semitism was accepted in the US after World War I. Cohn represented the Jewish establishment and contemporary readers would have understood this from his description. Hemingway clearly makes Cohn unlikeable not only as a character but as a character who is Jewish.^[108] Critics of the 1970s and 1980s considered Hemingway to be misogynistic and homophobic; by the 1990s his work, including The Sun Also Rises, began to receive critical reconsideration by female scholars.^[109]

[edit]Legacy and adaptations

Hemingway's work continued to be popular in the latter half of the century and after his suicide in 1961. During the 1970s, The Sun Also Rises appealed to what Beegel calls the lost generation of the Vietnam era.^[110] Aldridge writes that The Sun Also Rises has kept its appeal because the novel is about being young. The characters live in the most beautiful city in the world, spend their days traveling, fishing, drinking, making love, and generally reveling in their youth. He believes the expatriate writers of the 1920s appeal for this reason, but that Hemingway was the most successful in capturing the time and the place in The Sun Also Rises.^[111]

Bloom says that some of the characters have not stood the test of time, writing that modern readers are uncomfortable with the anti-semitic treatment of Cohn's character and the romanticization of a bullfighter. Moreover, Brett and Mike belong uniquely to the Jazz Age and do not translate to the modern era. Bloom believes the novel is in the canon of American literature for its formal qualities: its prose and style.^[112]

The novel made Hemingway famous, inspired young ladies across America to wear short hair and sweater sets like the heroine's—and to act like her too—and changed writing style in ways that could be seen in any American magazine published in the next twenty years. In many ways, the novel's stripped-down prose became a model for 20th-century American writing. Nagel writes that "The Sun Also Rises was a dramatic literary event and its effects have not diminished over the years".^[113]

The success of The Sun Also Rises guaranteed interest from Broadway and Hollywood. In 1927 two Broadway producers wanted to adapt the story for the stage but made no immediate offers. Hemingway considered marketing the story directly to Hollywood, telling his editor Max Perkins that he would not sell it for less than $30,000—money he wanted Hadley to have. Conrad Aiken thought the book was perfect for a film adaptation solely on the strength of dialogue. Hemingway would not see a stage or film adaption anytime soon:^[114] he sold the film rights to RKO Pictures in 1932,^[115] but only in 1956 was the novel adapted to a film of the same name. Peter Viertel wrote the screenplay. The royaltieswent to Hadley.^[116]

Hemingway wrote more books about bullfighting: Death in the Afternoon was published in 1932 and The Dangerous Summer was published posthumously in 1985. His depictions of Pamplona, beginning with The Sun Also Rises, helped to popularize the annual running of the bulls at the Festival of St. Fermin.^[117]