The Sun Also Rises

by Ernest Hemingway

Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris, was wounded in the war and cannot consummate his love for Lady Brett Ashley. Their circle drifts through cafes, then heads to Pamplona for the fiesta with Bill Gorton, Mike Campbell, and Robert Cohn. Brett has a fling with Cohn, then falls for teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. Cohn punches Jake and thrashes Romero. Brett leaves with Romero, then sends him away. Jake gets a telegram in Madrid and picks her up. In a taxi she imagines a good life together, and Jake answers with one dry line.

• The title comes from the Bible. One of the book's two epigraphs comes from Ecclesiastes, and the title lifts from the same passage about the sun rising. The other epigraph is Gertrude Stein's line about a lost generation.
• Britain got a different title. In Britain the novel came out as Fiesta, published by Jonathan Cape in 1927. The American edition, from Scribner's, appeared in 1926 under the title everyone now uses.
• Robert Cohn was a Princeton boxing champion. Cohn, the group's favorite target for insults, was middleweight boxing champion at Princeton, a fact the text gives in chapter one. That is why his fists matter in Pamplona.

• “Jake and Brett finally get together.” Wishful romantic thinking. Jake's war wound still blocks them at the end, and Brett has just parted from a teenage bullfighter. The final scene is two people in a Madrid taxi, still not together.
• “Jake is the bullfighter.” Wrong arena. Jake is an American newspaperman living in Paris who watches the bullfights as a devoted spectator. The matador is nineteen-year-old Pedro Romero.
• “Mike Campbell is Brett's husband.” Engaged, not wed. Mike Campbell is Brett's fiancé. She is still Lady Ashley from a previous marriage, and no wedding happens anywhere in the book.

• If they say: “What does Jake say in the very last line?”
  You say: “He says, 'Isn't it pretty to think so?' It answers Brett saying they could have had such a damned good time together. It is a polite shove at a fantasy.”
• If they say: “It's just rich expats getting drunk.”
  You say: “I'd say the drinking is covering a wound. Jake is a working journalist, he can't have Brett, and the Pamplona fiesta ends with Cohn punching him.”