The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway's first novel announced the Lost Generation with a precision no subsequent account has matched. Jake Barnes moves through Paris cafés and the Pamplona bullfights with a wound — physical and psychological — that makes his love for Brett Ashley permanently impossible. The novel's surface is all scene and dialogue; its depths are all grief and endurance. What strikes on rereading is how structurally radical the novel is — its refusal of plot in any conventional sense, its organization around place and ritual rather than event. The bullfighting sequences are Hemingway's most sustained meditation on craft, courage, and grace under pressure. The novel that invented a mode of feeling the twentieth century recognized as its own.

Hemingway's follow-up, A Farewell to Arms, takes the same spare prose style and applies it to the war itself, while The Complete Short Stories reveals the full range of his early genius.