The Sun Also Rises / The Old Man And The Sea

by Ernest Hemingway

The most popular of Ernest Hemingway's books, The Sun Also Rises is an elegant showcase for Hemingway's powerful prose, memorable characters, and biting social commentary on love and society post WWI. Following American and British expatriates from the lights of Paris to the bloody bullfights of Pamplona, The Sun Also Rises tells the haunting story of Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, inextricably in love with each other despite Jake's devastating war wounds and Brett's entanglements with a bankrupt English noble and a flamboyant Spanish bullfighter. Published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises captured the moral and spiritual decay endemic to Europe in the post-war period, and the resiliency that allowed the Lost Generation to rebuild their lives.

The last major work produced by Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953. Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, has gone 84 days without catching a fish. Confident that his bad luck is at an end, he sets off alone, far into the Gulf Stream, to fish. Santiago's faith is rewarded, and he quickly hooks a marlin… a marlin so big he is unable to pull it in and finds himself being pulled by the giant fish for two days and two nights. Showcasing Hemingway's trademark simplicity of style and powerful prose, The Old Man and the Sea is the epic tale of the struggle between life and death, personal courage, and man's desire to triumph when all hope seems to be lost.

Genres: Classics

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2014

About the author

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Best known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image. Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, including seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works. His writings have become classics of American literature; he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, while three of his novels, four short-story collections and three nonfiction works were published posthumously.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he spent six months as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star before enlisting in the Red Cross. He served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I and was seriously wounded in 1918. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. He married Hadley Richardson in 1921, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.
He divorced Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had worked as a journalist and which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn separated after he met Mary Welsh Hemingway in London during World War II. Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida, in the 1930s and in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. On a 1954 trip to Africa, he was seriously injured in two plane accidents on successive days, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where, on July 2, 1961 (a couple weeks before his 62nd birthday), he killed himself using one of his shotguns.

Reviews

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite things about Ernest Hemingway is an excerpt from a letter to critic Bernard Berenson in 1952 "Then there is the other secret. The isn’t any symbolysm [misspelled]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know". It's what made me want to read Hemingway (I'd only ever read a short story for a college English course) because I can't stand when people try to find more "purpose" in a literary work. "The Sun Also Rises" manages to make you feel a part of what's going on in spite of the limited time you're with the other characters. Sort of like you're stumbling around drunk with them. "The Old Man and the Sea" was surprisingly enjoyably considering it's a descriptive story about fishing. Definitely need to be under everyone's "classics" belt.

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[Melodie Wendel-Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable read: the sun also rises is a fun tale, reminds me of Miller/Thompson. And the old man and the sea is mature, inner dialogue of old man. Two tales of life that are still relatable.

"Women made such swell friends...you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship." (the sun also rises)

"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated." (the old man and the sea)

[Sarah Hendriks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tough to rate this as it’s two books in one. I didn’t love the Sun Also Rises. To me it lacked flow. It felt like a series of “and then this happened, then this and then this...”. The section about the bulls was more interesting.

The Old Man and the Sea I would rate much higher- more like 4.5 stars. It’s more adventurous and I love his appreciation for the sea.

[Ali Abdallah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful yet simple.

[Avery Taryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Sun Also Rises: boring and hateful, two stars
The Old Man and the Sea: the best Hemingway I’ve read this far, three stars

[René · Rating 2 out of 5]

The prose may have been great and innovative for its time, but the two stories have unfortunately not aged well.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

7/10. This is a two for one deal. I wanted to read “The Old Man and the Sea” but it is such a short book, they offered this two for one print with “The Sun Also Rises.” My goal is to read most, if not all, of the 100 greatest books ever written, and I thought I’d start with Ernest Hemingway, as he has this reputation for one of the most important writers of the last 100 years. I definitely enjoyed “The Old Man and the Sea” more and I can see why Hemingway has earned his reputation. His style is very to the point and he doesn’t waste a lot of time with long descriptions of people, settings, or events. Dialogue is short and brief. This helps as neither story here really captured 100% of my interest. Of the two, “The Old Man and the Sea” is certainly a more poignant story and obviously some kind of allegory which a concrete thinker like myself will have to google to decipher. Overall though, a good start to achieving my reading goal. 99 or so left...