From a startling new voice in 1926 to an American classic, Hemingway’s first novel has inspired nearly a century of praise, criticism, and reinterpretation.
When The Sun Also Rises was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons on October 22, 1926, Ernest Hemingway was 27 years old and already attracting attention for his short fiction. It was The Sun Also Rises, however, that transformed him into a major literary figure. The reviews that followed recognized something new in American writing, even when critics were less certain about the people and world Hemingway depicted.
Many early reviewers focused immediately on Hemingway’s prose. His short sentences, natural dialogue, restraint, and refusal to explain what his characters were feeling seemed strikingly different from much contemporary fiction at the time.
Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, poet and critic Conrad Aiken offered perhaps the most memorable early praise: “If there is a better dialogue to be written today I do not know where to find it.” Aiken considered Hemingway among the most exciting contemporary American fiction writers.
Bruce Barton, writing in The Atlantic, was similarly impressed by the originality of Hemingway’s voice, observing that he seemed to write as though he had fashioned the art of writing himself. Barton also praised Hemingway’s characters as extraordinarily real and alive.
The New York Times praised the novel’s “lean, hard, athletic” prose. That reaction captured what many reviewers were discovering: Hemingway had taken expatriates drinking in Paris, fishing in Spain, traveling, quarreling, falling in and out of love, and attending the fiesta and bullfights of Pamplona, and turned their seemingly aimless existence into something carefully controlled on the page.
Not everyone was enthusiastic. Some reviewers admired Hemingway’s technique while disapproving of his characters and their drinking, sexuality, cynicism, and apparent lack of purpose. Others questioned whether the spare style that had worked so effectively in In Our Time could sustain a novel. John Dos Passos, writing in New Masses, challenged what the book seemed to say about the direction of his generation.
As the decades passed, critics began looking beyond Hemingway’s revolutionary style. After World War II, scholars examined Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, masculinity, sexuality, religion, and what became known as the Hemingway “code” of courage and stoicism under pressure.
By the 1970s, The Sun Also Rises had found another generation of readers. Scholars have noted that its alienated young characters, shaped by the aftermath of World War I and searching for meaning, resonated with readers living through the social upheaval surrounding Vietnam.
Later, feminist scholars reconsidered Lady Brett Ashley and Hemingway’s treatment of women. Others examined gender and the performance of masculinity. More recent scholarship has explored race, ethnicity, psychology, economics, and the historical and cultural assumptions embedded in the novel.
What is remarkable is not that critical opinion about The Sun Also Rises has changed, but that the conversation continues. Nearly a century after those first reviews appeared, Peter L. Hays, who devoted an entire book to the novel’s critical reception, argues that changing interpretations often reveal as much about each generation of critics as they do about Hemingway’s novel.
And perhaps that is one of the clearest measures of what Hemingway accomplished in 1926.