1st edition, 1926

A bandaged Hemingway in front of Shakespeare and Company, a “Lost Generation” landmark

CLOSERIE DES LILAS, BOULEVARD MONTPARNASSE, PARIS

“We might as well go to the Closerie,” Brett said. “I can’t drink these rotten brandies.” (Ch. 8)

“ROMAN A CLEF”

L to R: Ernest Hemingway, Harold Loeb (Robert Cohn), Lady Duff Twysden (Lady Brett Ashley), Hadley Richardson, Donald Stewart, Pat Guthrie (Mike Campbell) in Pamplona, summer 1925

Hemingway, in white trousers, as torero (Pamplona, 1925)

Modernist Control

The modernist method was understatement, a seemingly objective way of presenting the hard scene or image, allowing readers to find the meaning for themselves. . .No ‘sentiment,’ no didacticism, no leading the reader: The modernist work would stand on its own words, would reflect unflinchingly its own world, and would smash through the façade of ‘polite literature’. . .

-Linda Wagner-Martin, New Essays on The Sun Also Rises (1987)

The Iceberg Theory

"A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit.”

– Hemingway, ”Art of the Short Story”

He smiled again. He always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the two of us; a rather shocking but really very deep secret that we knew about. He always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we understood. It would not do to expose it to people who would not understand.

-The Sun Also Rises, Ch. XIII

Irony and Pity “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.” “It sounds like a swell life,” I said. “When do I work?” “You don’t work. One group claims women support you. Another group claims you’re impotent.” “No,” I said. “I just had an accident.”

-TSAR, Ch. XII