Like Hemingway’s later novel A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises offers the reader two stories in one: a war story and a love story. What’s remarkable about this book—truly radical, really—is the fact that it features no scenes of battle whatsoever (not even in flashback) and no love scenes. Hemingway took on an enormous challenge when he wrote this, his first full-length novel. Most readers would agree that he rose to that challenge and perhaps surpassed it.
Some necessary historical background: World War I (or the Great War, as it was known at the time) began in August 1914 with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand. The war pitted the Central Powers (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) against the allied forces of Great Britain, France, Russia, and Italy, who were joined in 1917 by the United States. Largely as a result of the entry of the U.S. into the conflict (by which time Russia had withdrawn and Italy was effectively defeated), the Great War ended in victory for the Allies. Both sides agreed to an armistice on November 11, 1918.
Other nicknames for World War I were “the War to End All Wars” and “the War to Save Democracy.” There was a feeling on the part of many Americans who were drafted in 1917 and 1918 (as well as those like Hemingway himself who enlisted for service in the armed forces of other allied nations before the U.S. entered the fighting) that they were involved in a conflict that would change the world in fundamental ways. Additionally, most returned home after the armistice far more worldly and sophisticated than when they left. And yet, the Americans who hadn’t served were as provincial and isolationist as they’d been before the war—more so, in fact, as a new mood of conservatism swept the country.
This reactionary period manifested itself in a number of ways:
* Rejection by the U.S. Senate of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations proposed therein.
* Ratification in January 1920 of the Eighteenth Amendment, which forbade the manufacture and sale of all intoxicating beverages.
* The so-called Great Red Scare, set off by the spread of communism in Europe following the 1917 Russian Revolution, and by labor unrest in the States. Like the McCarthy Era of the late 1940s, the Red Scare period involved widespread suspicion and denunciation of Americans as communists and/or socialists.
* The rise of the Ku Klux Klan, formed in 1915 and dedicated to attacking African-Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, and others. The Klan’s membership had grown to five million by 1924, the year before The Sun Also Rises takes place.
* Legislative restrictions on immigration, especially from southern and eastern Europe, in the Immigration Act of 1921 and the Johnson Act (1924).
One result of the ugly postwar mood was a series of novels by U.S. writers critical of American provincialism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and racism. These include Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922); and An American Tragedy (1925) by Theodore Dreiser. The journalist H.L. Mencken was the unofficial leader of this movement to satirize, criticize, and thereby strike blows against what many saw as a moral failure on the part of American society at large.
A second, related response on the part of American writers involved leaving the country altogether, and many—best-selling novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and Modernist poet Ezra Pound, among others—did just that. They joined disaffected English- and Irishmen like Ford Maddox Ford and James Joyce in Paris, in a social and artistic circle that formed around the writer Gertrude Stein, herself an American expatriate. Stein is responsible for one of the epigraphs that introduce The Sun Also Rises (“You are all a lost generation”) and it was she who served as a creative writing teacher to Ernest Hemingway, who left the States in 1921.
