Ernest Hemingway’s first major novel, The Sun Also Rises follows American and British expatriates in France and Spain in the years following World War I. The novel electrified the literary community of the 1920s and was a popular success; it advanced Hemingway’s public celebrity and solidified the modernist style for which he would be recognized twenty-eight years later when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This edition provides an introduction, textual notes, a chronology, a bibliography, and six appendices of materials from the early twentieth century that will assist readers in interpreting The Sun Also Rises. This volume also addresses long-standing issues with the original editing of the novel and concerns about its portrayals of Jewish people, Black Americans, women, and others.
Ultimately, this Broadview Edition assists readers in understanding a work whose references and contexts have been obscured over its one-hundred-year existence, and it also opens up opportunities for new interpretations of this landmark novel.
Comments
“Debra Moddelmog’s edition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises gives readers a wealth of useful information. Besides a detailed Chronology and an expertly written Introduction, the editor has arranged more than two dozen excerpts from relevant cultural and social history. One learns from materials relating to war and post-war America, changing gender roles, the devastating influenza pandemic, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the power of immigration, and a wide assortment of critical views about the stripped-down style of United States modernism. A premier Hemingway scholar, Moddelmog also includes materials written by Hemingway himself—among these his Paris Review interview and excerpts about writing from Death in the Afternoon.” — Linda Wagner-Martin, Past President of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society
“Moddelmog’s edition of The Sun Also Rises is far more than its title suggests. It provides a concise yet thorough introduction to the novel’s modernist context, written by a Hemingway scholar of the highest caliber, as well as a wealth of contemporary primary sources with which students can work. Don’t dismiss Hemingway because of the received caricature; study him, with Moddelmog as your guide, to appreciate the rich complexity of the artist in his time.” — Alex Vernon, Hendrix College
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Ernest Hemingway: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Maps
The Sun Also Rises
Appendix A: Reviews, Letters, and Hemingway’s Creative Process
- 1. Allen Tate, “Hard-Boiled,” The Nation (15 December 1926)
- 2. From Edmund Wilson, “The Sportsman’s Tragedy,” The New Republic (14 December 1927)
- 3. Fanny Butcher, “Hemingway Seems Out of Focus in ‘The Sun Also Rises,’” Chicago Daily Tribune (27 November 1926)
- 4. Scribner’s advertisement for The Sun Also Rises, New York Times Book Review (23 January 1927)
- 5. From F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to Ernest Hemingway on The Sun Also Rises [early June 1926]
- 6. From Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)
- 7. From Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Appendix B: World War I and a Global Pandemic
- 1. From Woodrow Wilson, “Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany” (2 April 1917)
- 2. Clifford Carleton, “He is keeping the World safe for Democracy” (1916–18)
- 3. From Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals,” The Seven Arts (June 1917)
- 4. From Ernest Hemingway, “Six Men Become Tankers,” The Kansas City Star (17 April 1918)
- 5. From Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933)
- 6. Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920)
- 7. Siegfried Sassoon, “Autumn” (1918)
- 8. From “Fifth Av. Cheers Negro Veterans,” The New York Times (18 February 1919)
- 9. From Major George A. Soper, “The Influenza Pneumonia Pandemic in the American Army Camps during September and October, 1918,” Science (8 November 1918)
- 10. Poster about influenza prevention, Illustrated Current News (18 October 1918)
- 11. From Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Appendix C: Changing Norms for Men and Women
- 1. Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1920)
- 2. From Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction XXI,” Interview with George Plimpton, The Paris Review (Spring 1958)
- 3. From Elinor Glyn, The Philosophy of Love (1923)
- 4. From H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women (1922)
- 5. From F.P. Millard, What a Man Goes Through (1925)
- 6. From Elizabeth Benson, “The ‘Outrageous’ Younger Set,” Vanity Fair (September 1927)
- 7. From Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (1897; 1915)
Appendix D: Social and Political Turmoil in the United States
- 1. Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1919)
- 2. From “1917–1927,” The Nation (6 April 1927)
- 3. “How Shall We Meet the Klan?,” The World Tomorrow (March 1924)
- a. Horace J. Wolf, Part I
- b. George E. Haynes, Part II
- c. From John McPike Keresey, Part III
- 4. From “May Jews Go to College?,” The Nation (14 June 1922)
- 5. Hallahan (cartoonist), “The Only Way to Handle It,” The Evening Bulletin (May 1921)
Appendix E: Post–World War I Literature and Expatriate Paris
- 1. From Helen McAfee, “The Literature of Disillusion,” The Atlantic Monthly (August 1923)
- 2. “U.S. Citizens Give Self-Exile Causes,” The Washington Post (25 November 1928)
- 3. “Tourists Spend More Than Debt Payments Bring,” The Christian Science Monitor (1 June 1928)
- 4. From Ernest Hemingway, “American Bohemians in Paris a Weird Lot,” The Toronto Star Weekly (25 March 1922)
- 5. From Sisley Huddleston, “A Quarter That Tries” (1928)
- 6. “Corned Beef Hash Offered in Paris,” The Washington Post (9 December 1928)
- 7. “Paris Has Negro Colony, Drawn There By Jazz,” Daily Boston Globe (20 April 1928)
- 8. Langston Hughes, “To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” The Crisis (December 1925)
Appendix F: Spain, Basques, Bullfighting, and the Festival of San Fermín
- 1. From Havelock Ellis, The Soul of Spain (1908; rpt. 1920)
- 2. From Clara E. Laughlin, So You’re Going to Spain! (1931)
- 3. From Ernest Hemingway, letter to Bill Horne (17–18 July 1923)
- 4. From Ernest Hemingway, “World’s Series of Bull Fighting a Mad, Whirling Carnival,” The Toronto Star Weekly (27 October 1923)
- 5. From Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Works Cited and Recommended Reading
Permissions Acknowledgements
Debra A. Moddelmog is Dean of Liberal Arts Emerita and Professor of English Emerita at University of Nevada, Reno, and Emerita Professor of English at The Ohio State University.
