The Sun Also Rises Turns 100: Adam Gopnik on Why Hemingway Endures

Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises marks its centenary with a deluxe annotated edition from the Library of America, published October 13, 2026, featuring an introduction by Adam Gopnik.

Gopnik opens with a candid admission: the 1926 novel presents first-time readers with "surprising areas of sometimes dubious prejudice and often dated bigotries." The opening sentences about Robert Cohn carry "a tang of anti-Semitism" that strengthens as the book proceeds. Slighting references to gay men and the treatment of Lady Brett Ashley's sexuality as "a slightly undignified affliction" also jar contemporary taste. Unlike The Great Gatsby, Gopnik writes, Hemingway's novel has "barbed wire and thorns in the perimeter of its effects."

What keeps a 'boring travel vlog' alive for a century?

Gopnik cites a Reddit reader who dismissed the book in a Hemingwayesque cadence: "Just felt like a boring travel vlog…. Just people going to a place and doing a thing." The critic's verdict: the reader is "not entirely wrong—indeed, in an unintended or not fully realized way so entirely right." Hemingway stripped fiction of weighted allegory and labeled social comment, making it about particulars — the secret, Gopnik argues, of the book's "still-evergreen originality."

The plot is thin: expatriate Americans and Brits in 1920s Paris travel to Pamplona for the San Fermín fiesta and the bullfights. Lady Brett Ashley begins an affair with a young bullfighter, rejects Cohn, and never connects with the narrator Jake — the real love of her life, left impotent by a war wound. The epigraph's "lost generation," put into Gertrude Stein's mouth, may originally have meant merely "missing": millions of Frenchmen had died. Hemingway intends the romantic second sense, Gopnik writes, but in consciousness of the first — the war annihilated the survivors' confidence in the old order.

Who were the real people behind the characters?

The edition's annotations, alongside Lesley M. M. Blume's study Everyone Behaves Badly, map the novel onto life:

• Robert Cohn comes "almost without a transformative gesture" from editor Harold Loeb.
• Brett Ashley was the British aristocrat Duff Twysden.
• Bill blends writer Donald Ogden Stewart and Hemingway's childhood friend Bill Smith.

The real Twysden slept with Loeb but apparently not with Hemingway — her attachment to him nothing like Brett's piercing bond with Jake, one of many "consolatory fantasies" Hemingway dreamt up. The real "Cohn" lacked the pugilistic pretensions Hemingway mocks.

How does Hemingway's trick work?

The code Jake embodies — never complain, retreat inward, eat and drink well, value sensual pleasure over verbal discourse — is essentially the prewar British upper-class code, translated into a postwar language rather than replaced. "Hemingway brought the stoical code back to life exactly by not articulating it as a self-conscious code," Gopnik writes. "He gave it new life as a series of sensual experiences."

The craft lies in excision. Gopnik, who first read the book at twelve or thirteen, still recalls the trout packed on ferns and the innkeeper counting empty wine bottles: "We did not lose money on the wine, and the girl was shy but nice about bringing it. The old woman looked in once and counted the empty bottles." Influences include Flaubert, Stein's ABC style, newspaper prose and, above all, Cézanne, whom Hemingway credited as the key begetter.

Gopnik locates the "Rosetta Stone" of Hemingway's work in A Farewell to Arms: "Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers." He quotes Lev Grossman's list of "interstitial, throwaway moments" — the prostitute with bad teeth, the peasant taking extra wine — concluding that these alone would leave "one of the most overwhelmingly human books ever written."

That revolt against abstraction, Gopnik argues, became "the leitmotif of all acts of courage throughout the twentieth century," running from Saint-Exupéry to Simenon. Readers return from the novel, he closes, not to judge its author's prejudices but determined to find particulars of their own worth being faithful to.