Scribner & Hemingway: A Milestone in Publishing
From The Sun Also Rises onward, Ernest Hemingway published with Scribner for the whole of his career. A relationship that began with editor Maxwell Perkins in 1926, and one the house has honored ever since, keeping his catalog in print for a hundred years running.
That continuity has shaped how the novel has renewed relevance over time. When The New York Times reviewed it on publication in 1926, the paper read it as "A Marital Tragedy", reduced to a story about one doomed romance. Seventeen years later, in the thick of the Second World War, the Times returned to it in a very different mood. On August 1, 1943, the fourth entry in a wartime Book Review series revisiting the major American novelists, alongside Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck, critic James T. Farrell gave Hemingway the front page, under the headline "Ernest Hemingway, Apostle of a 'Lost Generation.'" The Sun Also Rises, he wrote, had been "generally heralded as the definitive account of a war-wearied lost generation," a novel whose "freshness has not faded with time," and one that "remains one of the very best American novels of the Twenties."
The 100th Anniversary Edition
"A cornerstone of the American literary canon," the Associated Press called it.
A hundred years on, the novel that ignited the Hemingway legacy is available in its authorized centennial edition — complete with a new introduction from bestselling author Colm Tóibín, and the entirety of the original text.
Eighty-three years after Farrell's verdict, that freshness is the whole premise of this centennial. There's more to the story than any one review captured. From the real trip to Pamplona that inspired it, the six weeks in the cafés of Montparnasse it took to write, the manuscript Hemingway once called Fiesta, and the famous closing line he cut down to almost nothing. Tracing the novel from inkling to inception, discover it all in the official The Sun Also Rises Centennial Companion.