Reading Order
The Sun Also Rises Reading Order
Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) is a complete standalone novel following a group of American and British expatriates — most of them veterans of World War I — who travel from Paris to Pamplona, Spain to watch the running of the bulls at the Festival of San Fermín. The novel's protagonist, Jake Barnes, is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, but their relationship is complicated by an injury Jake sustained in the war. The novel is Hemingway's debut and introduced 'the iceberg theory' — the idea that a writer should eliminate anything the reader doesn't need, leaving only the surface, while the weight of the story lies beneath.
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The Sun Also Rises
Complete The Sun Also Rises Book List
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The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway·1926·Standalone — Jake Barnes, Brett Ashley, and the Lost Generation in Paris and Pamplona; Hemingway's debut novel; the definitive portrait of post-World War I disillusionment - Buy
A Farewell to Arms
OptionalErnest Hemingway·1929·Hemingway's second novel — an American ambulance officer and an English nurse in Italy during World War I; the war novel that follows The Sun Also Rises in Hemingway's career; can be read independently
The Sun Also Rises — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Sun Also Rises a standalone?
Yes — The Sun Also Rises is entirely self-contained. Hemingway's other novels — A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and the Sea (1952) — are independent works.
What happened to Jake Barnes in the war?
Jake Barnes was wounded during World War I in a way that left him sexually impotent — the exact nature of the injury is never stated directly, in accordance with Hemingway's iceberg theory. The injury is the novel's central wound — it makes Jake's love for Brett permanently impossible and frames the novel's meditation on what the war took from the Lost Generation.
What is the Lost Generation?
The Lost Generation is the name given to the generation that came of age during World War I — specifically, to the American and European writers and artists who lived as expatriates in Paris in the 1920s. The term is usually attributed to Gertrude Stein, who told Hemingway 'You are all a lost generation.' In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway uses it as an epigraph. The Lost Generation includes Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and others who felt that the war had destroyed the ideals they had grown up with.
What is the significance of the bullfighting in The Sun Also Rises?
Bullfighting in the novel — and specifically Pedro Romero, the young matador — represents a form of authentic grace under pressure that the novel's wounded expatriates cannot achieve. Romero faces death directly and with artistry; the other characters flee their pain in alcohol, travel, and sex. The bullfight is one of the central symbols in Hemingway's aesthetics: the corrida as a formal art form in which the cost of failure is death.
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