Everyone is entangled with everyone else, and no one is happy. Robert Cohn (Jake's best friend) is also in love with Brett… and falls to pieces when Brett runs off with a studly young bullfighter. He loves the hottie-with-a-body and hard-drinking Brett Ashley, who loves him back but is engaged to hard-drinking Mike Campbell. We follow Jake Barnes, a hard-drinking tortured soul whose tour of duty during WWI has left him impotent. To put it another way: running with the bulls through the streets of Pamplona is probably the healthiest and most sensible thing these characters do. But if you're looking for some seriously lost souls traveling from Paris to Spain drinking like fishes, smoking like chimneys, and sleeping with all of their friends… look no further. Lucky for them, a burly young man by the name of Ernest Hemingway stepped up to the plate and became their voice.Īnd he did that with a slim novel called The Sun Also Rises.ĭon't crack this book looking for a happy-go-lucky literary romp. These lost kids were looking around for someone to put all this angst into words. 'Baby Boomers' sounds dumb, but at least it doesn't make us want to crawl under the covers and hide for five weeks.īut hey-it's a fitting name for the kids who came of age in the aftermath of WWI and realized that everything their parents told them about Victorian/Edwardian values, prosperity and hope was a big fat lie. We have to go way back in time to find them: back through the Millennials, Gen X, the Baby Boomers and The Greatest Generation to… the Lost Generation. Why? Well, in part because it's such an obnoxiously earnest phrase and also because there are so many voices out there that it would be hard to pick out just one from the cicada-like chorus of an average Twitter feed.īut we shouldn't hate on the idea of 'the voice of a generation' too hard, because it has some absolutely illustrious roots. The idea of being 'the voice of a generation' is now basically a punchline. Want more deets? We've also got a complete Online Course about The Sun Also Rises, with three weeks worth of readings and activities to make sure you know your stuff.

And the sun also rises