The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway's first novel and it was published in October 1926. Today I found the original review of the book published in the New York Times (Oct. 31, 1926) and decided I would share a few snippets from that review and add a bit of my own commentary to it.
NYT: Ernest Hemingway's first novel The Sun Also Rises, treats a certain of those younger Americans concerning whom Gertrude Stein has remarked: "You are all a lost generation."
It is well known that Hemingway served as a Red Cross volunteer in the Great War as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. After the war he became a correspondent for the Toronto Star living in Paris, 1921-28. While in Paris he famously palled around with other authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. The Sun Also Rises is one of the novels most closely associated with the Lost Generation due to the novel's epigraph, which is the quote by Gertrude Stein. This generation became disillusioned with traditional values after the terrible war and the huge toll it cost on human life. This disillusionment was on full display in The Sun Also Rises.
NYT: Mr. Hemingway has chosen a segment of life which might easily have become "a spectacle with unexplained horrors"...On the face of it, he has simply gathered, almost at random, a group of American and British expatriates from Paris, conducted them on a fishing expedition, and exhibited them against the background of a wild Spanish fiesta and bullfight. The characters are concisely indicated. Much of the inherent natures are left to be betrayed by their own speech, by their apparently aimless conversation among themselves. Mr. Hemingway makes his characters say one thing, convey still another...
The characters are Jake Barnes, a news correspondent working in Paris; Bill Gorton, an American novelist who is celebrating a recent publication of a book; Lady Brett Ashley, a British lady waiting for her divorce from a husband who returned from war with severe PTSD (though it wasn't called that in the book); Mike Campbell, Brett's fiancé, a hard-drinking Scottish war veteran; Robert Cohn, another author who is out of ideas for a new book, he is obsessed with Brett; and Pedro Romero, a bullfighter.
The characters, minus the bullfighter, spend the majority of the book drinking copious amounts of alcohol and talking about each other, often behind someone's back. Jake loves Brett while Robert is obsessed with her. She is with Mike but chases other men endlessly. In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald who asked what the book was about, Hemingway said, "the only instruction is how people go to hell."
NYT: The story is told in the person by Jake Barnes, an American newspaper correspondent. The approach notoriously invites digress and clumsiness. The way Hemingway plays this hard-boiled Jake is comparable to Jake's own evocations of the technique of the expert matador handling his bull. In fact, the bullfight within the story hears two relations to the narrative proper. It not only serves to bring the the situation to a crisis, but also suggests the design which Mr. Hemingway is following. He keeps goading Jake, leading him on, involving him in difficulties, averting serious tragedy for him, just as the matador conducts the bull through the elaborate pattern of danger.
It wasn't until I read this review that I understood what Hemingway was attempting to show us about his main character, Jake, through the example of bullfighting. Sometimes I have to get hit in the head before I finally understand why a book has become a classic. There it is. A bullfighting story to explain a man.
NYT: It is truly a gripping story, told in 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, filled with that organic action which gives a compelling picture of character.
Isn't this amazing? The reviewer recognized aspects of Hemingway's writing that the author came to be known for throughout his career: athletic prose and specific words arranged carefully. This was Hemingway's first novel and already he was showing us what to expect from him in the future.
Whew. I admit I like the book a bit more after reading this 100-year-old review, written in what I think of as old-fashioned language. Hemingway's writing style isn't my favorite. I miss the transitions and descriptions. I hated the constant and limitless drinking. I spent half the book worrying that someone was going to die from alcohol poisoning or that they were all alcoholics, which I've pretty sure that at least two of them were. Maybe the unrestrained alcohol use was Hemingway's idea of what going to hell looked like. I guess I would concur. Hemingway and the other Lost Generation writers were known for their heavy drinking. And alcohol use, or the numbing that happens when one drinks, could certainly be a symptom of the meaninglessness of a disillusioned generation.
Amor Towles, who wrote the introduction for the Penguin Classics edition I read, said this in conclusion:
The immediacy of the novel is one the central reasons for its durability. By focusing his narrative on an acutely observed moment in time unburdened by the baggage of the past or the moralizing of the future, by stripping his prose of qualifications, interruptions, and unnecessary verbiage, by allowing the flaws of his characters to be on unvarnished display, Hemingway ensures that we are fully present in the tale.
Hemingway takes us from alluring Paris, gives us a fishing trip for a reprieve, and ultimately we end up to Pamplona and are in the terrain of the bull. "The Sun Also Rises remains deeply satisfying despite essentially being a novel about unpleasant people behaving unpleasantly."
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Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Penguin, 2022.
“MARITAL TRAGEDY; the SUN ALSO RISES. By Ernest Hemingway. 259 Pp. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. $2..” The New York Times, 31 Oct. 1926, https://www.nytimes.com/1926/10/31/archives/marital-tragedy-the-sun-also-rises-by-ernest-hemingway-259-pp-new.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2026.
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