May 2025 Book, The Sun Also Rises

 

Talk About Books meets every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to participate at any time. Copies of the current month's selection are available at the library. You can reserve one by contacting us at 802-257-4603 or email from this website.

The Sun Also Rises is the first novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, following his experimental novel-in-fragments, In Our Time. 

It portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bull fights. An early modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work," and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel.

The characters are based on people in Hemingway's circle and the action is based on events, particularly Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain. Hemingway converted to Catholicism as he wrote the novel, and Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera notes that protagonist Jake Barnes, a Catholic, was "a vehicle for Hemingway to rehearse his own conversion, testing the emotions that would accompany one of the most important acts of his life." Hemingway presents his notion that the "Lost Generation"—considered to have been decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I—was in fact resilient and strong.


 

 

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