The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man in the Sea

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.