The Sun Also Rises

 

The Sun Also Rises is the early novel that made Hemingway famous: he emerged in that book with a distinctive, spare, prose style and a world-weary attitude that set the tone for the “Lost Generation” of American artist expats who would dominate modern literature in English for much of the 20th century. It is also, by the way, a very funny book—once you catch on to Hem's bone dry sense of humor.

The great American literary historian and critic Alfred Kazin wrote that Hemingway “put life back on the page, made us see, feel, and taste the gift of life in its unalloyed and irreducible reality.” The result? “To read Hemingway was always to feel more alive.”

Great fiction does not falsify. On the contrary, it brings us face to face with the nature of things.