I took the trout ashore, washed them in the cold, smoothly heavy water above the dam, and then picked some ferns and packed them all in the bag, three trout on a layer of ferns, then another layer of ferns, then three more trout, and then covered them with ferns. It was a hot day so I slit them all and shucked out the insides, gills and all, and tossed them over across the river. They were beautifully colored and firm and hard from the cold water. I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them. … I hooked another and brought him in the same way. Among such descriptions is this one that finds the narrator fly fishing in Spain’s Irati River: Anyway, it’s a powerful novel, the sort of novel that burns its descriptions into your senses while forever changing your view of certain things. Had Hemingway been half as good a novelist as he was a short story writer, that would be an even more impressive claim. Many consider The Sun Also Rises Hemingway’s best work. Scott Fitzgerald, who, having read the draft manuscript, persuaded him to cut the other seven-eighths. And if the final draft exemplified Papa’s “iceberg theory” (“The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water ” i.e., the less said and the more implied the better), it was largely thanks to F. An early draft version of the narrator character who would become Jake Barnes was named “Hem,” while other characters bore the names of their true-life counterparts. In fact the novel began its life as - if not a memoir, something very close to one. Lest you take umbrage at my characterization of the novel’s dramatis personae, a recent nonfiction book by Lesley Blume that unravels the real story behind Hemingway’s novel is titled Everybody Behaves Badly. The plot of Hemingway’s novel can be summed up thus: a group of expat louts travel to Spain from Paris to run with the bulls in Pamplona. Subsequent larger runs sold out even faster. Whether owing to this or not, the first print run of Hemingway’s first novel-5090 copies -sold out within two months. But Hemingway’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, felt that the illustration “breathed sex” and would therefore appeal to female readers. What this image has to do with the plot of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, let alone with its characters (who have as much in common with classical Greece as The Three Stooges) is anyone’s guess.

The illustration, printed in a medley of beiges and browns, depicts a loosely-robed, exhausted-looking woman inclined against an even more tired-looking tree, her head resting on her shoulder, her eyes closed, both shoulders and one thigh exposed, cupping a golden apple in one hand, a pan’s pipe resting by her sandaled foot. Published by Scribner’s in 1926, the first edition featured a Hellenistic jacket design illustrated by Cleonike Damianekes.

The sun also rises original cover