A hundred years ago, a young unknown writer turned one wild week in Spain, and the friends he fell out with, into the novel that defined a generation
In July 1925, a group of friends arrived in the Spanish city of Pamplona for the Festival of San Fermín. For a week, they drank, danced in the streets, watched bulls charge through the town each morning, and cheered at the bullfights each afternoon. They also fell in love with the wrong people, got into fistfights, and turned on one another. By the end of the week, friendships were in ruins.
One of the group was a 25-year-old American journalist named Ernest Hemingway. He was poor, ambitious, and almost completely unknown. Within days of leaving Pamplona, he began writing a novel about everything that had happened. He barely bothered to disguise his friends.
That novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published 100 years ago last week, on October 22, 1926. It made Hemingway famous, gave a name to a whole generation, changed the way people wrote English, and turned a Spanish festival into a world-famous event. It also cost Hemingway several friends and his marriage.
A novel written in a rush
Hemingway was living in Paris in the 1920s, along with many other young Americans and Britons. After the horrors of the First World War, Paris offered cheap rent, cheap wine, freedom, and art. Hemingway wrote short stories and newspaper pieces and moved in a circle of writers and artists, but he hadn't yet had a real success.
The Pamplona trip gave him his story. He started writing on July 21, 1925, his 26th birthday, and wrote at tremendous speed as he travelled through Spain and back to Paris. He finished a first draft in less than two months. Its working title was simply Fiesta. He later changed it to The Lost Generation, before settling on The Sun Also Rises.
The characters were his friends, thinly disguised. Lady Brett Ashley, the glamorous, hard-drinking Englishwoman every man falls for, was based on Duff Twysden, a real English aristocrat in their Paris crowd. Robert Cohn, the awkward, lovesick writer who gets into fights, was based on Harold Loeb, an American writer who had actually helped Hemingway’s career. The brilliant young bullfighter, Pedro Romero, was based on a real matador, Cayetano Ordóñez. And the narrator, Jake Barnes, an American newspaperman in Paris, was clearly based on Hemingway himself.
Readers in their Paris circle had no trouble working out who was who. Some of the real people were furious. Loeb, in particular, was deeply hurt by the cruel portrait of Cohn, and the friendship was badly damaged. Some of the real people behind the characters never spoke to Hemingway again.
Before the book came out, Hemingway’s friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, already famous for The Great Gatsby, read the manuscript. In a long handwritten letter, he told Hemingway the opening chapters were weak. Hemingway took the advice and cut them, which is why the novel now opens briskly, with Robert Cohn’s college boxing career. For the final title, Hemingway took a line from the Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes about generations passing away while the earth remains and the sun keeps rising.
The story: a love that can’t happen
On the surface, The Sun Also Rises is a simple story. A group of friends spend time drinking in the cafés of Paris, then travel to Spain for fishing in the mountains and the festival in Pamplona.
Underneath, it’s a heartbreaking love story. Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley are in love, but they can never be together. Jake was wounded in the war, and the novel hints that the injury left him unable to have a sexual relationship. Brett, restless and reckless, can’t commit to a life without one. So she drifts from man to man, while Jake looks on, hiding his pain behind jokes and drink.
In Pamplona, everything boils over. Brett is engaged to one man, has had a fling with another, and then falls for the 19-year-old bullfighter. Jake, who loves her, ends up helping her get together with Romero. Jealousy explodes into violence. The festival’s wild joy turns into a hangover of shame and regret. In the famous final scene, Brett tells Jake they could have had a wonderful time together. Jake’s quiet, bitter reply, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”, has become one of the best-known last lines in American fiction.
The Lost Generation
At the front of the book, Hemingway placed a remark by his friend and mentor Gertrude Stein: “You are all a lost generation.” According to Hemingway’s later memoir, A Moveable Feast, Stein picked up the phrase from a French garage owner who was scolding a young mechanic for working too slowly on her car.
The label stuck. It came to describe the young people who had come of age during the First World War: people who had seen millions die, who had lost faith in the old ideas of honor and glory, and who now seemed to be drifting, drinking, and searching for meaning. Hemingway’s characters were exactly that. They are wounded, some physically and all emotionally, and they fill the emptiness with travel, parties, and endless drinks.
Interestingly, Hemingway didn’t think his generation was really lost at all. He said he had placed the second quote at the front of the book, from Ecclesiastes, to balance Stein’s. Generations come and go, and people suffer and fail, but the earth endures, and the sun also rises. His characters are damaged, but they’re still standing.
A new way of writing
What really made the novel a sensation was how it was written.
Before Hemingway, much popular fiction was full of long sentences, flowery description and characters who explained their feelings at length. Hemingway did the opposite. His sentences are short and plain. His characters rarely say what they really feel. Instead, they talk about drinks, money, fishing, and bullfights, and the reader senses the pain underneath.
Hemingway later described this as his “iceberg theory.” Only a small part of an iceberg shows above the water, and the rest is hidden below. A writer, he argued, can leave out important things, and if he writes truly enough, the reader will feel them anyway. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake never directly describes his wound or makes a speech about his love for Brett. He doesn’t need to. You feel it in every scene.
This style changed the way generations of writers wrote, from crime novelists to journalists. Many of the plain, punchy sentences we take for granted today owe something to Hemingway.
A scandal and a bestseller
When the book came out, not everyone was impressed. Reviews were mixed. Some critics were shocked by characters who drank constantly, slept around, and seemed to care about nothing. Hemingway’s own mother, a devout and respectable woman back in Illinois, wrote to tell him it was a doubtful honor to have produced one of the filthiest books of the year.
But readers loved it. The first printing of just over 5,000 copies quickly sold out, and more printings followed. Young people across America started copying the characters, drinking and talking like them, and dreaming of Paris and Spain. The book made Hemingway a celebrity almost overnight and set him on the path to the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he won in 1954.
The novel’s success came at a personal cost. While writing it, Hemingway began an affair with a fashion journalist, Pauline Pfeiffer. In the autumn of 1926, his first wife, Hadley, separated from him, and their divorce came through in January 1927. The novel is dedicated to Hadley and their young son, and as part of the divorce settlement, Hemingway gave her all the book’s royalties.
How one book changed Pamplona
Foreign visitors were coming to the festival before 1926, and the bull runs were already reported in newspapers abroad. But after The Sun Also Rises, the trickle became a flood. Readers around the world wanted to see the festival for themselves.
Today, well over a million people pour into Pamplona every July. In 2022, the figure was nearly 1.7 million. Thousands run with the bulls through the narrow streets each morning, dressed in white with red scarves. Hemingway went back to the festival again and again, nine visits in all, and the city has repaid him with a monument beside the bullring, which stands on an avenue named after him.
Here’s the twist: for all the people he inspired to risk their necks in front of the bulls, Hemingway himself never ran with them. He watched from the sidelines and left the running to his readers. Few novels have reshaped a real place so completely.
Reading it in 2026
A hundred years on, The Sun Also Rises isn’t always comfortable to read. Its attitudes can be ugly. Robert Cohn is Jewish, and the other characters, and at times the novel itself, mock him in openly antisemitic terms. Modern readers can’t ignore that, and they shouldn’t. The book’s treatment of bullfighting will also trouble many readers today.
But the book still has the power to grab readers. Its characters feel strikingly modern: restless, rootless, anxious, drinking to forget, unable to settle down, and carrying wounds they won't talk about. Swap the cafés of Paris for a group chat and a cheap flight, and Jake and Brett could be people you know.
Hemingway turned one chaotic week in Spain into a book about love, loss, and carrying on regardless. Some of his friends never forgave him. Readers never forgot him. A hundred years later, the sun is still rising on his first great novel.
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