Everybody behaves badly: the true story behind Hemingway's masterpiece The Sun Also Rises

Abstract

Lesley Blume’s book depicts the ‘making of’ of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises by studying the personalities who inspired it and the immeasurable changes it brought to the literary world. Blume is a well accomplished North American cultural historian and journalist who - amongst other achievements - has covered the United States presidential elections of 2000 and the September 11th catastrophe of 2001. This book, released on June 7, 2016 has already become a source of polemic in face of her revelations about Hemingway’s debut novel that gave voice to the so-called “Lost Generation”. During the summer of 1925, Ernest Hemingway and a group of disorderly friends went to Pamplona, in Spain, for the well-known annual San Fermín bull fighting festival. Subsequently, throughout the next weeks to come he conducted the expedition like an orchestra of turbulent wild waters – quite a plate full of creative motivation for a writer - including drunkenness, wrestles, sexual competitiveness, nighttime infidelities, and next day hangovers, which he spilled out and translated into his trailblazing novel The Sun Also Rises.