The Sun Also Rises

2007 Audie Award Finalist for Classics “The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost.” —The Wall Street Journal Originally published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped cement Ernest Hemingway's status as the one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. A poignant look at disillusionment and angst, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most indelible characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is set during an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. The story lays bare themes of alienation and disenchanted youth. Hemingway's first novel is “an absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heartbreaking narrative...a truly gripping story, told in lean, hard, athletic prose” (The New York Times).

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961. William Hurt was an Academy Award winning actor whose many films include A History of Violence, The Village, Body Heat, The Big Chill, Sunshine, Smoke Eyewitness, Broadcast News, Children of a Lesser God, and Kiss of The Spiderwoman. His stage credits include Henry V, Hamlet, Richard II, HurlyBurly, and My Life. He passed away in 2022 at the age of seventy-one.