The Sun Also Rises is probably Ernest Hemingway's greatest novel, largely because it is more inventive in its treatment of love and war than the other work that vies for this distinction, A Farewell to Arms, published four years later. Both are less propagandistic than Hemingway's third great war story, For Whom the Bell Tolls — which relies partly on flashback for its effect and also descends at times into the stylistic mannerism that marred Hemingway's later work. Certainly The Sun Also Rises is vastly superior to the remaining Hemingway novels (To Have and Have Not and Across the River and Into the Trees, and the posthumously published Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden) as well as the novellas The Torrents of Spring (which preceded The Sun Also Rises) and The Old Man and the Sea. In fact, the only other volume in the Hemingway oeuvre that stands up to a comparison with The Sun Also Rises is the writer's debut story collection, In Our Time. That book's postwar tales, "Soldier's Home" and "Big Two-Hearted River," both share a subject with The Sun Also Rises. "Big Two-Hearted River" was perhaps a kind of rehearsal for this novel; it is a story about war's destructiveness that never even mentions war — not once.
The action of The Sun Also Rises takes place during the mid-1920s in three locations:
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Paris, mainly the city's Latin Quarter and Montparnasse districts, on the Left Bank south of the River Seine. Because the University of Paris is located in the Latin Quarter, intellectuals and artists have frequented this neighborhood for centuries.
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The Basque region of France and Spain. For hundreds if not thousands of years, a distinct people known as the Basques have occupied three provinces in the southwest of France and four in northern Spain. The Basque country straddles the Pyrenees mountains, and it faces the Atlantic Ocean on one side. (The resort town of San Sebastian is located here.) The town of Pamplona, the setting of much of The Sun Also Rises, is in the Spanish province of Navarra, in the Basque region's rural interior. The Basques speak a language that is entirely unrelated to either Spanish or French, and they are credited with inventing the beret (worn by Brett and Mike in the novel), the espadrille (a rope-soled shoe), and the game of jai alai. The Basques are fiercely independent, which may partially explain the attraction of the region to Jake, Brett, and the others; it is a place apart from the rest of Europe and, thus, to some degree, apart from European history, including the Great War.
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Madrid, capital of Spain.
