Recommendations

Books Like The Sun Also Rises

What to read after The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) is the defining novel of the Lost Generation — Jake Barnes, Brett Ashley, and the Paris expatriates who travel to Pamplona in the shadow of what World War I took from them. If you were drawn to Hemingway's iceberg prose, his portrait of pleasure as a way of not thinking, and his examination of what war does to people, these novels offer the same experience.

  1. 1

    A Farewell to Arms

    by Ernest Hemingway

    Hemingway's second novel — an American ambulance officer and an English nurse in Italy during World War I; the war novel that precedes The Sun Also Rises chronologically and explains what created the wounds Jake Barnes carries; can be read first or after

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  2. 2

    The Great Gatsby

    by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway in Long Island in 1922 — the companion piece to The Sun Also Rises: both novels are about the same American and European world of the 1920s, told by a witnessing narrator; Fitzgerald and Hemingway were close friends and rivals during this period

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  3. 3

    For Whom the Bell Tolls

    by Ernest Hemingway

    An American with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War — Hemingway's own Spanish experience, later than The Sun Also Rises but the same Spain; his longest and most ambitious novel

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  4. 4

    Tender Is the Night

    by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    An American psychiatrist on the French Riviera in the 1920s — the same expatriate world as The Sun Also Rises, the same gilded surface over damage, written by the Lost Generation's other defining writer; Fitzgerald wrote much of it in the same places Hemingway describes

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  5. 5

    All Quiet on the Western Front

    by Erich Maria Remarque

    German soldiers in the trenches of World War I — the most important anti-war novel written from the other side of the same war; the European parallel to The Sun Also Rises, documenting the same generation's destruction in the same war from a very different perspective

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  6. 6

    The Old Man and the Sea

    by Ernest Hemingway

    An old Cuban fisherman alone on his boat for three days — Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize winner and the last major work published in his lifetime; the purest expression of the iceberg theory, the same meditation on grace under pressure in an even more concentrated form

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  7. 7

    On the Road

    by Jack Kerouac

    Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty crossing America in the 1940s and 1950s — the Beat Generation's equivalent of The Sun Also Rises: a generation's disillusionment given form in a road trip, with the same sense of movement as the only alternative to a settled life that feels like death

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  8. 8

    Moveable Feast

    by Ernest Hemingway

    Hemingway's posthumous memoir of his years in 1920s Paris — the autobiographical source of The Sun Also Rises, with portraits of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and the café and restaurant world that the novel depicts; published in 1964

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