Hemingway, Ernest

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Ernest Hemingway

Excerpt from The Sun Also Rises
Published in 1926

One of the most influential authors of the twentieth century, Hemingway was a leading figure among the famous U.S. expatriates (people who live outside of their home countries) who lived in Paris during the Roaring Twenties. As a young man who had participated and been wounded in World War I (1914–1918; the United States entered the conflict in 1917), Hemingway both embodied and voiced the viewpoint of the disillusioned postwar generation. His work is characterized by a spare, succinct writing style with a distinctively modern feel that, especially in the 1920s, presented a strong contrast to the ornate prose of the nineteenth century.

"I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway was influenced by both his physician father, who introduced him to the joys of the outdoors, and his music-loving, rather domineering mother. Each year the family vacationed on a lake in northern Michigan, which would provide a wealth of material for Hemingway's fiction. In high school, he wrote articles for his school newspaper and also took part in athletics. After graduation, he tried to volunteer for military service in World War I, but was rejected due to poor vision. Instead of attending college, as his parents wished, he got a job as a reporter for the Kansas City Star newspaper. There Hemingway began to develop the clipped, concise writing style that would characterize his later work.

Unable to stay away from the war, Hemingway enlisted in the medical service of the Red Cross and was sent to Italy to serve as an ambulance driver. In that role he experienced the devastation and brutality of war first-hand. After being wounded in the knee, he managed to carry another man to safety; later, doctors removed two hundred pieces of shrapnel (jagged pieces of metal from an exploded bomb) from his legs and body. Hemingway subsequently enlisted in the Italian army and spent some more time fighting before returning to the United States. He lived for almost a year with his parents in Oak Park, writing and speaking in public about his war experiences.

Finally Hemingway was hired as a foreign correspondent by the Toronto Star newspaper. With his new wife, Hadley Richardson, he moved to Paris and soon became part of a group of U.S. writers who were living there, including poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and novelists Gertrude Stein (1872–1946) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940). Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in 1923, followed by a collection of short stories titled In Our Time (1925). The second book features one of Hemingway's best known characters, Nick Adams.

The Sun Also Rises was published in May 1926, after Hemingway had returned to the United States. It opens with a quote from Gertrude Stein: "You are all a lost generation." Although Hemingway later said that he had not intended to define anyone, both the quote and the novel were interpreted as expressing the plight of those who had come of age just before, during, or after World War I. Several of the novel's characters are, like Hemingway, disillusioned veterans of the fighting who sustained physical or emotional damage (or both). All of them are now living a morally bankrupt existence of joyless drinking, dancing, and shifting sexual liaisons.

The novel is narrated by Jake Barnes, whose injury in the war resulted in impotence (the inability to function sexually). He is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a young English woman who, after losing her fiancé in the war, married another

Gertrude Stein: An Expatriate and Modernist

Unconventional and highly intellectual, Gertrude Stein was a Roaring Twenties figure known both for her experimental literary works and as a hostess and mentor to U.S. and British expatriates. Expatriates are those who live outside of their native countries, and during the 1920s many flocked to Paris, France.

Born in 1874, in Oakland, California, Stein was the youngest child of a wealthy Jewish family. She attended noted women's college Radcliffe University and then Johns Hopkins University. Stein first studied psychiatry before determining her primary interest in literature.

After traveling around Europe and Africa with her brother Leo, Stein and her brother settled in an apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris in 1903. The apartment became a gathering place, or "salon," for artists and writers. The Steins' friends and guests included such famous painters as Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, who painted a well-known portrait of Stein. Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, young writers, were also frequent visitors.

In 1909 Stein took on a companion and secretary, California native Alice B. Toklas. That same year, Stein published her first book, Three Lives, which contained short novels about the lives of three female characters. Tender Buttons (1914), a collection of prose poems written in a distinctly modern style, was Stein's next work.

During World War I, Stein and Toklas remained in war-torn Paris, and Stein volunteered as a medical supply driver. After the war, U.S. writers and artists arrived in Paris, seeking refuge from a society they considered intolerant and materialistic. Stein welcomed them into her salon, especially the novelist and short story writer Ernest Hemingway, who quoted her in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises as having said, "You are all a lost generation." Other members of Stein's circle included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Edith Sitwell.

Stein's literary works during the 1920s included the novel, The Making of Americans (1925). This complex work chronicles three generations of a German-American family similar to the Steins. It reflects Stein's interest in delving beneath the surface of personality, as well as her unconventional approach to writing. Her style features long sentences made up of simple words, with no punctuation other than periods. This kind of experimentation with form and content made her writing both purely modern and inaccessible to most readers. Nevertheless, her work was much appreciated by a small, sophisticated audience.

In the 1930s Stein published books of memoirs, plays, art criticism, and literary theory. Her most famous book was the bestselling, widely acclaimed Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which actually tells the story of Stein's life. Stein and Toklas stayed in France during World War II. After Paris was liberated from Nazi (German) occupation, Stein resumed her famous salon. She died of cancer in 1946.

man purely for the wealth and aristocratic title he could provide. She is now engaged to Mike Campbell, an alcoholic with few prospects and a brutal nature. Brett returns Jake's love, but she cannot do without the sexual relations he is unable to offer. The Sun Also Rises chronicles the characters' interactions in both Paris and Spain, where they travel to attend the yearly running of the bulls and the bullfighting spectacular. By the end of the novel, nothing has changed.

In the first part of this excerpt, Jake and Brett ride in a taxicab to join friends at a Paris nightclub. Their strong attraction to each other is evident, but it becomes clear to the reader that their relationship is doomed by Jake's inadequacy. In the second part, Jake goes to be alone after leaving Brett with her friends. He thinks about his injury, then goes to sleep. Later Brett arrives for a visit, eventually leaving Jake alone with his sad thoughts.

Things to remember while reading this excerpt from The Sun Also Rises …

The novel is laced with references to a number of dominant issues and trends of the Roaring Twenties, including the expatriate movement, Prohibition (the Constitutional ban on alcohol, which the characters can ignore since they live outside of the United States), women's changing roles, and especially the effects of World War I. The first armed conflict to include such effective weapons as machine guns, airplanes that could drop bombs, and trench warfare, this war shocked the whole world with its toll of death and destruction. Evidence of both physical and emotional damage are evident in the character of Jake Barnes, the novel's protagonist.

The early part of the novel chronicles the characters' relentless merrymaking as they drink and dance their way around Paris. It soon becomes clear, however, that they find little joy in these pursuits and that their lives are actually meaningless and bleak.

In her pursuit of pleasure, her independence, and her appearance—featuring short hair and a man's hat pulled low on her forehead—Lady Brett Ashley embodies a new kind of woman that was beginning to emerge in the Roaring Twenties. Unlike the women of earlier decades, she drinks as much as the men around her, and seeks sexual satisfaction with a variety of partners, even rejecting Jake's love because he cannot perform sexually.

Excerpt from The Sun Also Rises

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What happened next …

Following the success of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway went on to write another acclaimed novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929). This book tells the story of an American ambulance driver wounded in Italy during World War I, whose idyllic love affair with an English nurse ends with her death. During the 1930s, Hemingway published two nonfiction works, Death in the Afternoon (1932), about bullfighting, and The Green Hills of Africa (1935), about his travels on that continent. Later novels include To Have and Have Not (1937), which centers on characters affected by the Great Depression (the period of economic downturn and widespread hardship that lasted from late 1929 until the early 1940s). For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) was inspired by Hemingway's experiences as a correspondent for Collier's magazine during the Spanish Civil War. During World War II (1941–45), Hemingway served as both a reporter and a military volunteer.

Having divorced his first wife in 1927, Hemingway soon married Pauline Pfeiffer. While living in Key West, Florida, during the 1930s, Hemingway met Martha Gelhorn, with whom he carried on a secret affair for four years before divorcing Pfeiffer and marrying her. He and his new wife moved to Havana, Cuba, where Hemingway spent much of his time fishing. This setting and occupation provided material for one of his best novels, The Old Man and the Sea. This story of a Cuban fisherman's heroic struggle with a shark earned Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. The next year, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Hemingway's final years were marred by physical illness and injury as well as emotional strain. After divorcing Gelhorn, Hemingway had married Mary Welsh and moved with her to Ketchum, Idaho. About a year after treatment for depression and other ailments proved ineffective, Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun in July 1961. Since his death, Hemingway's work has been faulted by some as shallow, excessively violent, and demeaning to women. Most commentators, however, acknowledge Hemingway's influence on the writers of the later twentieth century, many of whom have imitated his spare narrative style.

Did You Know …

Hemingway was passionately interested in the sport of bullfighting, which plays a prominent role in The Sun Also Rises. One of the few admirable characters in The Sun Also Rises is the young bullfighter Pedro Romero, whose skill, bravery, and good looks attract Lady Brett Ashley. Hemingway's knowledge of bullfighting rituals and figures is evident not only in this novel but in his nonfiction work, Death in the Afternoon (1932).
The novel's narrator, Jake Barnes, resembles his creator in other ways. Like Hemingway in the early 1920s, Jake is a veteran wounded in World War I and an expatriate journalist living in Paris. He also shares the author's appreciation for drinking, bullfighting, and fishing, and he speaks in the same unadorned style in which Hemingway writes.

Consider this …

On their way to watch the bullfights in Pamplona, Spain, Jake and his friend Bill Gorton spend some time fishing in that country's Basque region. How does this section present a different view of relationships than the other parts of the book?
To learn more about Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s, read his posthumously (after death) published memoir A Moveable Feast (1964). Share what you've learned through a book report or other project.