The novel that named a generation. The book that taught American prose how to mean what it doesn't say.

In 1926, a twenty-seven-year-old American newspaperman in Paris published a novel about expatriate drinkers traveling from Montparnasse to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. He wrote it in six weeks. He revised the opening for two years. When it appeared, modern American fiction began. The Sun Also Rises gave the lost generation its name, its diction, its rhythm of disenchanted afternoons. Every American novel about postwar disillusion descends, in some line, from this one.

Jake Barnes narrates his own story without explaining it. A wound from the Great War has left him unable to consummate his love for Lady Brett Ashley, who knows it, who sleeps with everyone else, who returns to him anyway. Hemingway told this story by removing nearly everything a novelist is taught to include — interiority, exposition, moral judgment. What remains is one of the most influential prose surfaces ever written in English.

Jake Barnes — the narrator who never quite tells the reader what happened to him in the war; the man whose wound the entire novel circles without naming.

Lady Brett Ashley — one of the first fully modern women in American fiction, drawn without sentimentality and without judgment.

Robert Cohn — the figure the novel's group bullies and the figure its readers have argued about for a hundred years: portrait of antisemitism, or critique of it?

Pedro Romero — the nineteen-year-old matador in whom Hemingway invested everything he believed about courage, dignity, and the art that aging cannot touch.

And the bulls of Pamplona — the festival that Hemingway, who had been there only twice when he wrote the book, would return to almost every year for the rest of his life.

✦ Complete unabridged text of the 1926 first edition (Scribner).

This edition also includes:

✦ The Lost Generation and Its Wounds: Masculinity, Desire, and the Unspeakable — an original ten-part critical study by Henry Bugalho covering the lost typescript, the nature of Jake's wound, the Brett problem, the Cohn problem, the formation of the Hemingway style, the Pamplona chapters, the closing line, the phrase "lost generation," and the critical afterlife.

✦ A substantial author biography in fourteen parts: the Michigan childhood, the Italian wound, the four marriages, the Spanish Civil War, the Nobel Prize, the posthumous texts, Ketchum, and the death.

✦ Editorial footnotes for Spanish vocabulary, French phrases, Paris and Pamplona geography, period slang, and identifications of the real people behind the characters.

For readers who enjoy:

✦ F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night) — the other great American novelist of the same Paris years.

✦ Joan Didion, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy — three generations of writers Hemingway made possible.

✦ The expatriate Paris memoirs: Hemingway's own A Moveable Feast, Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company.

✦ The bullfighting literature: Death in the Afternoon, García Lorca, and Spanish writing on tauromaquia.

A century after publication, the novel still does what very few first novels manage: it produces an emotion the prose refuses to name. That refusal is the technique. It is also the book's greatest gift to the writers who followed.

"Isn't it pretty to think so?"

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, closing line