The Sun Also Rises and Other Works

By Ernest Hemingway and Ken Mondschein

A collection of Ernest Hemingway’s works from the early 1920s, including one of his most famous works, The Sun Also Rises, as well as short stories and poems.

Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, is also his most widely acclaimed. Set against the backdrop of Paris café society and the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, the novel focuses on the lives of American expatriates in the 1920s. Although the Lost Generation is often considered to have been damaged and dissolute in the aftermath of World War I, Hemingway portrays them as strong characters who are imbued with independence. This edition also includes Hemingway’s novella The Torrents of Spring, the short story collection In Our Time (1925), and various other short stories, poems, and newspaper and magazine articles from the early 1920s. A scholarly introduction examines Hemingway’s life and writing career, providing readers with a deeper understanding of his works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Classics
• Release date: Jan 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667200033

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961. 

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

____________________

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

—from A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway is one of those writers who has become shorthand for an entire idea—in his case, a sort of American masculinity that, while decidedly unfashionable today, and which ultimately proved destructive to the author himself, left an indelible mark on twentieth-century English literature. Like American power itself, Hemingway was forged in the fires of World War I, and for the rest of his life, he would follow conflict—and danger—all over the world. His sharp, choppy prose not only mirrors the stoic manner of his ideal male; it broke with form and created a new model for literature for a new world.

While he seems to hearken back to traditional values of toughness and self-sufficiency, Hemingway was also a thoroughly modern writer. His protagonists are not invincible or omnipotent superheroes. They are broken men, damaged by modernity, morally and physically imperfect, who, though they know their struggle is ultimately doomed, fight the inevitability of death. Hemingway’s writing simultaneously reflects both his own deep psychic damage and trauma—he committed suicide at the age of 61—and his rejection of anything he considered weak or soft. At the same time, he is essentially an existentialist: in a world devoid of higher meaning, where all human effort is ultimately futile, communication is flawed, and love is the mere animal urge to mate, we create our own meaning by making the choices that are authentic to our true selves. When a Hemingway character goes hunting or fishing, for instance, he is not just killing animals; rather, by imposing his will on the natural world, he is insisting that his own existence has meaning.

But when we think of Hemingway, we think not just of his brilliant literary output but of his hypermasculine image: the handsome, womanizing young expatriate in Paris; the sportsman on safari in Africa or hunting in Montana; the aging patriarch, grizzled but still virile, a bottle of whiskey beside his typewriter as he sits on the veranda of his house in Havana or in his study in Sun Valley, Idaho. In reality, Hemingway never drank while writing, saying he left that to Faulkner. Hemingway’s public persona was very much a self-fashioning, and it was no less his instrument than was his typewriter. Just as Hemingway was inspired by Gertrude Stein, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack London, writers from Jack Kerouac to Hunter S. Thompson would model not just their own prose, but their lifestyles, on his. (Thompson, in fact, once stole a pair of elk antlers from Hemingway’s Idaho home.) Hemingway, in short, was not merely a writer: he was the model for a certain sort of artistic identity that found its expression everywhere from the Beats to the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

EARLY LIFE

_______________

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899, to an upper-middle-class family; he was named after his British-born maternal grandfather. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, called Ed, was a medical doctor and avid outdoorsman; his mother, the former Grace Hall, was an accomplished musician and artist who had turned down an opera career to marry Ed Hemingway. The two met when Ed, as a young doctor, assisted in house calls during Grace’s mother’s illness and death from cancer. Ed and Grace's three eldest children (Ernest was the second) were born in Grace's father's house; the Hemingway family lived there until his death in 1905. They then sold the house, which has since been restored as a museum, and moved a few blocks away to 600 North Kenilworth Avenue, where the last two children were born. The family would take frequent vacations to rural Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where young Ernest learned to camp, fish, swim, and shoot.

Grace Hemingway did not perform the domestic tasks that were considered a woman’s proper work in those days—in fact, her husband did much of the cooking and laundry, while childcare was entrusted to nannies—but she did insist on her children being exposed to art, literature, and, of course, music. Grace was an active campaigner for women’s suffrage and outearned her husband early in his career by teaching music lessons and recitals. She was also, by all accounts, supremely self-absorbed. Moreover, Ed Hemingway suffered from depression and mood swings and often withdrew from the family; he would ultimately commit suicide by shooting himself at the age of 57.

Grace’s relationship with Ernest, her eldest son, was fraught. Ernest was an athletic young man who gravitated toward his own interests, which included boxing, football, and, of course, writing. Some critics have reflected that it is in this contrast between his forceful, dynamic, and vain mother and his withdrawn father that we can find the roots of the hyper-masculinity and, indeed, frequent misogyny in Hemingway’s writing. While some commentators have suggested that this was because his mother dressed him in feminine clothes for the first years of his life—at times she claimed Ernest and his sister Marcelline were twins, sometimes male and sometimes female—we should point out that frilly outfits for baby boys were not uncommon in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and that Marcelline was encouraged to play with male toys just as Ernest was encouraged to play with female toys. What is certain is that the teenaged Hemingway blamed his mother for his father’s moodiness: he felt it was her overbearing nature that made his father weak. My mother is an all time all american bitch and she would make a pack mule shoot himself; let alone poor bloody father, he would write after his father’s suicide several years later.

WAR SERVICE

_______________

Great writers, it often seems, have an origin myth. For Kipling, it was India; for Jack London, it was Alaska; for Hemingway, it was World War I. Hemingway worked as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star right out of high school, but volunteered for military service as soon as he was of age. After being rejected from the army for his poor eyesight, he was able to join up as an ambulance driver. Hemingway arrived in Paris in May of 1918, just as the German army, reinforced by units freed up by the Russian withdrawal from the war, launched a last-ditch effort to force an Allied surrender before the United States could bring its full power to bear. Paris had been bombarded by long-range artillery fire since March, and many of the citizens had fled, while the government itself made plans to withdraw to Boudreaux. Casualties on both sides numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Hemingway did not remain long in Paris before he was sent to the Italian front. His first day in Milan was the occasion of an explosion in a munitions factory; his first job was recovering the remains of the 35 women who had worked there. I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments, he recalled later in Death in the Afternoon.

At first, like many young men, the eighteen-year-old Hemingway thought himself invulnerable—until, returning to the front lines with chocolate and cigarettes for the troops, he was badly wounded in both legs by shrapnel from an Austrian mortar shell. As he was being carried to safety, machine-gun bullets ripped into his knee and foot. Six months of recovery would follow. For his wounds, he would be awarded the Silver Metal of Military Valor by the Italian government. When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality, he later wrote in his introduction to 1942’s Men at War. Other people get killed; not you. It can happen to other people; but not to you. Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you.

Recuperating back in Milan, Hemingway befriended the future ambassador and author, Henry Serrano Villard, and also Eric Edward Dorman-Smith, who would later become a forward-thinking military strategist, brigadier general, and Irish liberationist. Already, Hemingway was showing his need for an audience and his capacity to charm those around him—qualities that would be both a great strength and a great weakness in his later years. Hemingway also met Agnes von Kurowsky, a beautiful nurse seven years his senior. The two fell in love and made plans to marry; however, Hemingway returned to the United States in January of 1919, and a few months later Agnes wrote to report she had become engaged to an Italian officer. The experience of this first heartbreak was, like his relationship with his mother, one of the things that future biographers would argue cast a shadow over the rest of Hemingway’s tumultuous romantic life.

THE PARIS YEARS

_______________

War and the experience of almost losing his leg had scarred Hemingway. Oak Grove had become too small, his ambitions too big, his family too overbearing. He had suffered both a traumatic brain injury from the mortar shell (the first of many he would endure) and severe post-traumatic stress disorder. As he would throughout his life, Hemingway covered his weakness with bravado—for instance claiming that, despite his injuries, he had still helped a soldier to safety, or that he had returned to fight beside the Italians before seeking aid. Much to the consternation of his abstentious parents, his alcohol consumption also increased markedly.

Hemingway escaped to the Upper Peninsula, then to Toronto, where he became a newspaper reporter for the Toronto Star. The Star gave him steady employment as he retreated back to rural Michigan and then Chicago. In no place, however, could he find refuge for his troubled soul—though in Chicago, he met beautiful, vivacious, red-haired Hadley Richardson, a friend of his roommate’s sister, who would become his first wife. Though eight years his senior, the sheltered, orphaned Hadley seemed less mature than her years, while the war had aged Hemingway beyond his. The two seemed a good match.

The couple planned to travel to Italy, but Hemingway’s friend, the novelist Sherwood Richardson, suggested Paris instead. Not only was the exchange rate favorable, it was in the center of everything interesting. From his base of operations in the bohemian Latin Quarter, Hemingway would file 88 stories with The Star, discover bullfighting in Spain, and travel to cover the atrocities of the Greco-Turkish war, including the fire that almost destroyed the port city of Smyrna.

But even more important to Hemingway’s Paris years were the people. The writer and art collector Gertrude Stein was the nucleus around which the renowned creative minds of the Lost Generation, as she dubbed them, would crystallize: painters such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, and Joan Miró; writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Ezra Pound; the publisher Sylvia Beach, who owned Shakespeare & Co.; and, of course, Stein’s partner and amanuensis Alice B. Toklas. Hemingway charmed them all. He and Pound would become close friends, and Joyce would become a drinking buddy—though Hemingway would eventually become estranged from Stein. Nonetheless, not only was her prose a tremendous influence on his own, but the aesthetic of modernism, whose chief characteristic was the doubting, dissolving, and reconstruction of all the prewar generation had praised as good, would mark Hemingway’s career.

On December 2, 1922, Hemingway suffered an incredible, yet formative, professional loss: He had been sent to Switzerland to cover the Conference of Lausanne, which ended the Greco-Turkish war and renegotiated the terms of the postwar Turkish surrender. By day, he covered the conference; by night, he drank with the progressive muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffans. Hadley, sick with a cold, remained behind, but when her husband wrote and asked her to join him, she packed his manuscripts—including the carbon-copy duplicates—to take with her. However, the suitcase was lost—or stolen—at the Gare de Lyon train station when she left her luggage unattended to buy a bottle of water. It had contained nearly all of Hemingway’s early work, including his juvenilia; only Up in Michigan and My Old Man survived—the former because Gertrude Stein had told him it was unpublishable because of its frank and psychologically complicated depiction of a rape, the latter because it was out with an editor.

Ezra Pound, writing to console his friend, said that if the stories were at all good, then he could re-create them from memory, and probably better. However, Hemingway did not sit down again at his typewriter until Pound commissioned some pieces for The Little Review in February of 1923. The resulting vignettes were about war, bullfighting, and the execution of political prisoners. Then, after a fishing trip in Italy, Hemingway sat down and pounded out Out of Season in one marathon session. It was published, with Up in Michigan and My Old Man, in Three Stories and Ten Poems in the fall of 1923. The 31-page collection of 18 vignettes, in our time, followed shortly thereafter. Both were very small print runs; additionally, in our time was originally published with a hand-cranked press on hand-made paper, with plenty of white space to highlight the starkness of the text and the matter-of-fact descriptions of violence. In 1925, it would be expanded and republished as In Our Time by the New York firm of Boni and Liveright. The short stories contained therein introduce the character of Nick Adams, Hemingway’s alter ego for his younger self, and chronicle scenes of loss of innocence through a young man’s childhood, adolescence, war service, marriage, and, finally, fatherhood.

While some critics see trying to make up for the lost manuscripts as bringing on Hemingway’s mature, lean style of writing, others hold that this was already visible in what we have of his early work such as Up in Michigan and My Old Man. Hemingway called this distinctive mode of writing the iceberg style: like an iceberg, the greater mass of what the writer wishes to say should not be visible, but implicit. As he later wrote in Death in the Afternoon:

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 developed this economy out of necessity in his work as a reporter and carried it through in his fiction. Stein's similar philosophy of writing was also, of course, an incalculable influence. He first applied this iceberg style in Out of Season: he later said that the real ending, which he leaves unstated, is that the old fishing guide hangs himself. Likewise, in his later story Hills Like White Elephants, the fact that the surgery the man wishes his girlfriend to undergo is an abortion is never mentioned; what is implied is more powerful than what is said.

Stories such as The Indian Camp and Out of Season also show inklings of the main themes Hemingway would tackle throughout his life’s work: sex and death and the inescapability of both, as well as confusion, miscommunication, and impotence. The country doctor in The Indian Camp means to provide an educational experience for his son, and winds up traumatizing him, while the Native American father kills himself out of a sense of his own impotence; the tourist in Out of Season hires the town drunk as a fishing guide and forgets the sinkers. Neither he nor his wife, nor the old man nor the townspeople, can understand one another.

YEARS OF SUCCESS

_______________

Hemingway was not in Paris for the publication of his first two books. Hadley was pregnant, and the two decided to travel to Toronto to have their child. The couple’s only child, John Jack Hadley Nicanor, was born on October 10, 1923—Nicanor after a bullfighter who had impressed the writer when the couple visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona over the summer. Hadley, however, dubbed the baby Bumby—a name that stuck for life. Ernest Hemingway, meanwhile, picked up the nickname Papa, which he was called by everyone in their circle, even much older friends.

Hemingway quickly decided that the life of a Toronto journalist was not for him, and he and Hadley returned to Paris in early 1924, baby Bumby in tow. They rented a larger apartment, and for two years they lived a grand life, skiing in Austria during the winter and making pilgrimages to Pamplona to watch the bullfights during the summer. Having read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway determined that he, too, should write a novel. He began The Sun Also Rises on his twenty-sixth birthday, in 1925, and finished it eight weeks later. It was published by Scribners in October of 1926. (Torrents of Spring had also been published earlier that year; many feel that the novella, which satirizes the writing of many of Hemingway’s friends, was a lesser work only written in an attempt to get out of his contract with Boni and Liveright in favor of a more lucrative one.)

In its exploration of the pursuit of the fascinating and promiscuous Lady Brett Ashley, The Sun Also Rises embodies both the Lost Generation’s psychic trauma and its hiding of the same behind a veil of idealized masculinity. Hemingway’s ideal man is traced in the white space between these characters—sexually potent, dominant, secure, and little valuing relationships with the opposite sex. The protagonists were based on friends who had accompanied the Hemingways to Pamplona that year, and Harold Loeb, on whom Hemingway based the character of Robert Cohn, felt the antisemitic portrayal of his fictional doppelganger a great betrayal.

Hemingway’s treatment of romantic partners was problematic not just in his art, but in real life. It was also at this time that he began having an affair with journalist Pauline Pfeiffer. Hadley became aware of the infidelity in early 1926. Even so, Pauline accompanied the couple and their friend-group to Pamplona that summer. Hadley asked Ernest for a divorce later that year; it was completed in January 1927, and Ernest quickly married Pauline—converting to Catholicism in the process. He assigned all the royalties from The Sun Also Rises to Hadley. Also in 1927, he published another short story collection, Men Without Women, which included Hills Like White Elephants and his acclaimed boxing tale Fifty Grand. The subjects were difficult ones—abortion, homosexuality, and racism expressed in terms so frank its language still shocks us today.

Hemingway’s early relationship with Pauline had its share of bad luck: he contracted anthrax while on their honeymoon and acquired another concussion and a large scar on his forehead when he pulled a skylight down on himself in his Paris bathroom, thinking the pull was a toilet chain. The couple moved back to the United States in March of 1928 during Pauline’s first pregnancy, but this time it was to stay. They settled primarily in Key West but traveled extensively; their son Patrick was born in Kansas City in June of 1928. (Hemingway’s preferred physician, Don Carlos Guffrey, was in residence there.) Pauline’s difficult labor and caesarean section with Patrick was the basis for Catharine Barkley’s death in A Farewell to Arms, which Ernest was working on at the time, while the character herself—a nurse who falls in love with a wounded ambulance driver on the Italian front of World War I—was clearly inspired by Ernest’s wartime romance with Agnes von Kurowsky.

Hemingway’s disquietude over these and other incidents fueled his art. He often took real-life events, then magnified them to answer his own anxious what-ifs. A prime example of this is how his wartime leg wounds became Jake Barnes’s sexual maiming in The Sun Also Rises, which in turn became a powerful symbol for the psychic maiming of an entire generation. Certainly, anxiety and depression ran in his family. On December 6, 1928, he was boarding a train in New York City when he received word that his father, Ed Hemingway, had killed himself with his own father’s Civil War revolver. Though he detested his father’s weakness, the writer remarked, I’ll probably go the same way. (Hemingway’s siblings Ursula and Leicester would both end their own lives, and his granddaughter, Margaux, who also struggled with mental illness, would take an overdose of barbiturates in 1996, becoming the fifth person in four generations of the Hemingway family to die by suicide.)

A Farewell to Arms was published in September of 1929, firmly establishing Hemingway as a major American writer. His life with Pauline settled into a sort of predictable, if restless, migratory pattern through the early 1930s, with domestic life in Key West punctuated by periods of travel. His and Pauline’s second child and Hemingway’s third son, Gregory, was born in 1931, again in Kansas City. (Mirroring his father’s own tortured relationship with his maleness, Gregory suffered from gender dysphoria and began transitioning to a female identity, Gloria, later in life, though it was a complicated journey that resists a conventional transgender narrative. Gregory is inconsistently referred to by both male and female names and pronouns.) The Hemingways’ summers were spent camping and hunting in Wyoming; there were trips to Spain to watch bullfights and research what would become his nonfiction book Death in the Afternoon (1932), as well as fishing and sailing expeditions in the Caribbean—especially on his boat, the Pilar, which he purchased in 1934. In 1933, the couple went on safari to Africa, guided by the famous Philip Percival, who had once guided Hemingway’s hero Theodore Roosevelt; the trip provided material for his travelogue The Green Hills of Africa (1935) and several short stories, notably The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR AND WORLD WAR II

_______________

While Hemingway lived his own itinerant life, the continent of Europe was undergoing a tumultuous period of its own. Mussolini’s Fascists had effectively seized control of Italy by 1924; Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933. The next storm was brewing in Spain, where a coup d’état propelled Generalissimo Francisco Franco into power in 1936. A civil war broke out, pitting Franco’s right-wing Nationalists (the Blacks), supported by Hitler and Mussolini, against the left-wing Republicans (the Reds), who were a coalition of democrats, Communists, and anarchists supported by the Soviet Union, the United States, France, Mexico, and Portugal. The conflict, which was later called by Claude Bowers, the American ambassador to Spain, a dress rehearsal for World War II, lasted until 1939, with numerous atrocities committed on both sides. A half million people were killed; another half-million fled into exile.

Despite Pauline’s reluctance, Hemingway left to cover the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance in March of 1937. He would send home 31 dispatches; write To Have and Have Not, which is remarkable mostly for its racist language and its overt Communist sympathies; and, with his friend John Dos Passos, aid in filming a pro-Republican propaganda film. The two writers had a rupture after Dos Passos’s friend and translator, the scholar José Robles, was shot by the Reds—that is, their own side—for supposedly leaking military plans. Hemingway, a committed lifelong socialist like his other hero, Jack London, felt the execution was necessary in time of war. Dos Passos, disillusioned, began moving toward the political right.

Also in Spain, Hemingway began an affair with the writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn, whom he met in Key West in 1936 and who would become his third wife. Though he traveled back to Key West several times, he was present for the Republican last stand at the Battle of the Ebro in 1938. Returning from the war, he changed his winter base of operations from Key West to Havana, Cuba, where he was joined by Martha. He also began summering in Ketchum, Idaho. Hemingway married Martha after his divorce from Pauline was finalized in 1940. His experiences in the war would form the basis for his acclaimed For Whom the Bell Tolls, published that same year.

Hemingway involved himself in World War II even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which precipitated the United States’ entry into the war. He followed Martha on assignment to China, which had been invaded by Japan, in 1941. Finding the country disagreeable, he reportedly remained drunk most of the time. Back in Havana, Hemingway had the Cuban government arm the Pilar as a Q-boat so he could patrol for submarines in the Caribbean. (He never caught any, which was probably a good thing since his plan was to charge the U-Boat armed with only a machine-gun and grenades.) Despite his celebrity, he was not able to get over to Europe until 1944; however, once there, he embarked on yet another affair with a female journalist, Time correspondent Mary Welsh. As he refused to get Martha a place as a journalist on a flight to England (his own had been arranged by Roald Dahl), she was forced to make a hazardous sea crossing on a munitions ship through waters infested with German U-Boats. When she finally arrived in London, Martha found her husband laid up from a drunk-driving accident; nonetheless, he bullied and verbally abused her. It was clear their marriage was at an end.

Despite his injuries from the car accident, Hemingway managed to be present at the D-Day landings. Though he wasn’t allowed to go ashore, he provided a vivid description for Collier’s magazine—a job he had sniped from his soon-to-be ex-wife. Martha made her own landing in France by impersonating a nurse and sent back stories of the human toll of the conflict. Hemingway, meanwhile, kept inserting himself into the action—both textually (which infuriated his editors) and militarily (which so infuriated the chain of command that he was brought up on charges for leading a band of partisans). He was present for the liberation of Paris, which had him in such a good mood that he even forgave Gertrude Stein, and—despite being sick with pneumonia—he was also present for part of the Battle of the Bulge.

The fruits of his self-promotion were not only a byline and the expansion of his legend, but a Bronze Star he was awarded in 1947. The other benefit Hemingway reaped was financial: the market for literary fiction expanded after the war, in no small part thanks to the US government providing paperbacks to GIs, and his work sold like never before.

FINAL YEARS

_______________

Mary Welsh became Hemingway’s fourth and final wife in 1946. His physical health began to decline. Besides being severely injured in yet another car accident in 1945, his heavy drinking and generally unhealthy lifestyle led to weight gain, hypertension, and, eventually, diabetes. With the exception of his wartime correspondence, Hemingway had done little writing from 1942 to 1946, when he began In the Garden of Eden, which would be published posthumously. In 1948, he and Mary traveled to Italy, where his love affair with the teenaged Adriana Ivancich inspired his novel Across the River and Into the Trees. Mary, recuperating from a broken ankle, observed her husband’s pursuit of a woman thirty years his junior with resignation. Nothing came of the affair, and the poor reception of Across the River and Into the Trees inspired Hemingway, almost out of spite, to throw himself into a new book—The Old Man and the Sea. Often considered his finest work, it was published in 1952 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954. The book’s themes—the struggle against nature, the inevitability of death, and, of course, the reclaiming of virility—are the logical culmination of Hemingway’s life’s work.

The year 1954 was not only the pinnacle of Hemingway’s international career: it was also the beginning of the end. While visiting the Congo, Hemingway was severely injured in two successive plane crashes—the first plane crash-landed after hitting a utility pole, while the second, intended to bring him and Mary to medical care, exploded on takeoff—and then, after surviving the two wrecks, he was badly injured in an unrelated brush fire. He was unable to travel to Stockholm to receive his Nobel, and the pain from his injuries would plague him for the rest of his life, his decline notably exacerbated by his heavy drinking. Nonetheless, Hemingway managed a final burst of productivity: in 1956, he retrieved the notebooks he had stored at the Ritz Hotel in Paris back in 1927 and wrote A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his early years; a final book on bullfighting, The Dangerous Summer, which grew out of a 10,000-word work commissioned by Life magazine; and he worked on The Garden of Eden, as well as two other novels, True at First Light and Islands in the Stream. These manuscripts were locked in a vault in Havana and would only be published posthumously: A Moveable Feast in 1964, Islands in the Stream in 1970, The Garden of Eden in 1986, and True at First Light in 1999.

In declining physical and mental health, worried about money, and afraid that the FBI was watching him for his support of Fidel Castro (they had, in fact, opened a file on him as early as the 1940s), Ernest Hemingway killed himself with his favorite shotgun in his Ketchum, Idaho, home in the early morning of July 2, 1961. While Hemingway had initially supported Fidel Castro’s coup, his Cuban home, Finca Vigía, had been taken over by the Cuban government after the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Mary Hemingway managed to negotiate with the Cuban government for his manuscripts and today Finca Vigía is a museum, as are his Ketchum and Key West homes.

Hemingway’s legacy lives on not only in the Hemingway industry, including movies, documentaries, a line of furniture established by his son Jack, a fountain pen, and numerous cocktail recipes and bars named Harry’s, but in his enduring work. Mary Hemingway founded the Hemingway Foundation in 1965, and his papers were later donated to the John F. Kennedy Library for subsequent generations of scholars to study. As problematic as the author himself might have been, and as problematic as some of his works remain, they endure because they echo life itself. His is an art forged in fire and quenched in blood. Its complexity resists easy categorization. Scratch beneath the surface of Ernest Hemingway’s man’s world, and we find sensitivity, pain, and unparalleled psychological depth.

Ken Mondschein, PhD

THE SUN ALSO RISES

________________________________________

THIS BOOK IS FOR HADLEY

AND FOR JOHN HADLEY NICANOR

You are all a lost generation.

—Gertrude Stein in conversation

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose… The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits… All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

—Ecclesiastes

Book I

CHAPTER I

_______________

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly. Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had become of him.

Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him. He was married five years, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance of the estate having gone to his mother, hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife; and just when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature-painter. As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.

The divorce was arranged and Robert Cohn went out to the Coast. In California he fell among literary people and, as he still had a little of the fifty thousand left, in a short time he was backing a review of the Arts. The review commenced publication in Carmel, California, and finished in Provincetown, Massachusetts. By that time Cohn, who had been regarded purely as an angel, and whose name had appeared on the editorial page merely as a member of the advisory board, had become the sole editor. It was his money and he discovered he liked the authority of editing. He was sorry when the magazine became too expensive and he had to give it up.

By that time, though, he had other things to worry about. He had been taken in hand by a lady who hoped to rise with the magazine. She was very forceful, and Cohn never had a chance of not being taken in hand. Also he was sure that he loved her. When this lady saw that the magazine was not going to rise, she became a little disgusted with Cohn and decided that she might as well get what there was to get while there was still something available, so she urged that they go to Europe, where Cohn could write. They came to Europe, where the lady had been educated, and stayed three years. During these three years, the first spent in travel, the last two in Paris, Robert Cohn had two friends, Braddocks and myself. Braddocks was his literary friend. I was his tennis friend.

The lady who had him, her name was Frances, found toward the end of the second year that her looks were going, and her attitude toward Robert changed from one of careless possession and exploitation to the absolute determination that he should marry her. During this time Robert’s mother had settled an allowance on him, about three hundred dollars a month. During two years and a half I do not believe that Robert Cohn looked at another woman. He was fairly happy, except that, like many people living in Europe, he would rather have been in America, and he had discovered writing. He wrote a novel, and it was not really such a bad novel as the critics later called it, although it was a very poor novel. He read many books, played bridge, played tennis, and boxed at a local gymnasium.

I first became aware of his lady’s attitude toward him one night after the three of us had dined together. We had dined at l’Avenue’s and afterward went to the Café de Versailles for coffee. We had several fines after the coffee, and I said I must be going. Cohn had been talking about the two of us going off somewhere on a weekend trip. He wanted to get out of town and get in a good walk. I suggested we fly to Strasbourg and walk up to Saint Odile, or somewhere or other in Alsace. I know a girl in Strasbourg who can show us the town, I said.

Somebody kicked me under the table. I thought it was accidental and went on: She’s been there two years and knows everything there is to know about the town. She’s a swell girl.

I was kicked again under the table and, looking, saw Frances, Robert’s lady, her chin lifting and her face hardening.

Hell, I said, why go to Strasbourg? We could go up to Bruges, or to the Ardennes.

Cohn looked relieved. I was not kicked again. I said good-night and went out. Cohn said he wanted to buy a paper and would walk to the corner with me. For God’s sake, he said, why did you say that about that girl in Strasbourg for? Didn’t you see Frances?

No, why should I? If I know an American girl that lives in Strasbourg what the hell is it to Frances?

It doesn’t make any difference. Any girl. I couldn’t go, that would be all.

Don’t be silly.

You don’t know Frances. Any girl at all. Didn’t you see the way she looked?

Oh, well, I said, let’s go to Senlis.

Don’t get sore.

I’m not sore. Senlis is a good place and we can stay at the Grand Cerf and take a hike in the woods and come home.

Good, that will be fine.

Well, I’ll see you to-morrow at the courts, I said.

Good-night, Jake, he said, and started back to the café.

You forgot to get your paper, I said.

That’s so. He walked with me up to the kiosque at the corner. You are not sore, are you, Jake? He turned with the paper in his hand.

No, why should I be?

See you at tennis, he said. I watched him walk back to the café holding his paper. I rather liked him and evidently she led him quite a life.

CHAPTER II

_______________

That winter Robert Cohn went over to America with his novel, and it was accepted by a fairly good publisher. His going made an awful row I heard, and I think that was where Frances lost him, because several women were nice to him in New York, and when he came back he was quite changed. He was more enthusiastic about America than ever, and he was not so simple, and he was not so nice. The publishers had praised his novel pretty highly and it rather went to his head. Then several women had put themselves out to be nice to him, and his horizons had all shifted. For four years his horizon had been absolutely limited to his wife. For three years, or almost three years, he had never seen beyond Frances. I am sure he had never been in love in his life.

He had married on the rebound from the rotten time he had in college, and Frances took him on the rebound from his discovery that he had not been everything to his first wife. He was not in love yet but he realized that he was an attractive quantity to women, and that the fact of a woman caring for him and wanting to live with him was not simply a divine miracle. This changed him so that he was not so pleasant to have around. Also, playing for higher stakes than he could afford in some rather steep bridge games with his New York connections, he had held cards and won several hundred dollars. It made him rather vain of his bridge game, and he talked several times of how a man could always make a living at bridge if he were ever forced to.

Then there was another thing. He had been reading W. H. Hudson. That sounds like an innocent occupation, but Cohn had read and reread The Purple Land. The Purple Land is a very sinister book if read too late in life. It recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic land, the scenery of which is very well described. For a man to take it at thirty-four as a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books. Cohn, I believe, took every word of The Purple Land as literally as though it had been an R. G. Dun report. You understand me, he made some reservations, but on the whole the book to him was sound. It was all that was needed to set him off. I did not realize the extent to which it had set him off until one day he came into my office.

Hello, Robert, I said. Did you come in to cheer me up?

Would you like to go to South America, Jake? he asked.

No.

Why not?

I don’t know. I never wanted to go. Too expensive. You can see all the South Americans you want in Paris anyway.

They’re not the real South Americans.

They look awfully real to me.

I had a boat train to catch with a week’s mail stories, and only half of them written.

Do you know any dirt? I asked.

No.

None of your exalted connections getting divorces?

No; listen, Jake. If I handled both our expenses, would you go to South America with me?

Why me?

You can talk Spanish. And it would be more fun with two of us.

No, I said, I like this town and I go to Spain in the summer-time.

All my life I’ve wanted to go on a trip like that, Cohn said. He sat down. I’ll be too old before I can ever do it.

Don’t be a fool, I said. You can go anywhere you want. You’ve got plenty of money.

I know. But I can’t get started.

Cheer up, I said. All countries look just like the moving pictures.

But I felt sorry for him. He had it badly.

I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.

I’m not interested in bull-fighters. That’s an abnormal life. I want to go back in the country in South America. We could have a great trip.

Did you ever think about going to British East Africa to shoot?

No, I wouldn’t like that.

I’d go there with you.

No; that doesn’t interest me.

That’s because you never read a book about it. Go on and read a book all full of love affairs with the beautiful shiny black princesses.

I want to go to South America.

He had a hard, Jewish, stubborn streak.

Come on down-stairs and have a drink.

Aren’t you working?

No, I said. We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables, and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working. Anyway, we went downstairs to the bar and had a whiskey and soda. Cohn looked at the bottles in bins around the wall. This is a good place, he said.

There’s a lot of liquor, I agreed.

Listen, Jake, he leaned forward on the bar. Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

Yes, every once in a while.

Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?

What the hell, Robert, I said. What the hell.

I’m serious.

It’s one thing I don’t worry about, I said.

You ought to.

I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or other. I’m through worrying.

Well, I want to go to South America.

Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.

But you’ve never been to South America.

South America hell! If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same. This is a good town. Why don’t you start living your life in Paris?

I’m sick of Paris, and I’m sick of the Quarter.

Stay away from the Quarter. Cruise around by yourself and see what happens to you.

Nothing happens to me. I walked alone all one night and nothing happened except a bicycle cop stopped me and asked to see my papers.

Wasn’t the town nice at night?

I don’t care for Paris.

So there you were. I was sorry for him, but it was not a thing you could do anything about, because right away you ran up against the two stubbornnesses: South America could fix it and he did not like Paris. He got the first idea out of a book, and I suppose the second came out of a book too.

Well, I said, I’ve got to go up-stairs and get off some cables.

Do you really have to go?

Yes, I’ve got to get these cables off.

Do you mind if I come up and sit around the office?

No, come on up.

He sat in the outer room and read the papers, and the Editor and Publisher and I worked hard for two hours. Then I sorted out the carbons, stamped on a by-line, put the stuff in a couple of big manila envelopes and rang for a boy to take them to the Gare St. Lazare. I went out into the other room and there was Robert Cohn asleep in the big chair. He was asleep with his head on his arms. I did not like to wake him up, but I wanted to lock the office and shove off. I put my hand on his shoulder. He shook his head. I can’t do it, he said, and put his head deeper into his arms. I can’t do it. Nothing will make me do it.

Robert, I said, and shook him by the shoulder. He looked up. He smiled and blinked.

Did I talk out loud just then?

Something. But it wasn’t clear.

God, what a rotten dream!

Did the typewriter put you to sleep?

Guess so. I didn’t sleep all last night.

What was the matter?

Talking, he said.

I could picture it. I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends. We went out to the Café Napolitain to have an apéritif and watch the evening crowd on the Boulevard.

CHAPTER III

_______________

It was a warm spring night and I sat at a table on the terrace of the Napolitain after Robert had gone, watching it get dark and the electric signs come on, and the red and green stop-and-go traffic-signal, and the crowd going by, and the horse-cabs clippety-clopping along at the edge of the solid taxi traffic, and the poules going by, singly and in pairs, looking for the evening meal. I watched a good-looking girl walk past the table and watched her go up the street and lost sight of her, and watched another, and then