document_title: My Big Fat Greek Wedding

question_text: who plays ian in my big fat greek wedding

text: My Big Fat Greek Wedding

text: Plot[edit]

text: Being 30-years-old and single, Fotoula "Toula" Portokalos is her family's black sheep. The daughter of staunchly proud Greek immigrants, she was raised to follow her cultural tradition of marriage and motherhood. Her golden-child sister Athena met her family's expectations by marrying young to another Greek and becoming, in Toula's words, "a Greek baby-breeding machine". Toula still lives with her parents and works at Dancing Zorba's, her family's restaurant in Chicago. Toula longs for her own life away from the restaurant and her intrusive family. Frumpy and cynical, she fears her life will never change. One day at the restaurant, Toula notices a handsome young customer—Ian Miller, a school teacher. She tries to speak to him, only to embarrass herself with her social awkwardness. Ian is bewildered by her behavior, and Toula figures she's lost her chance to get to know him.

text: Toula's idea for independence is taking computer classes at a community college. When Toula approaches her father Gus about the classes, he forbids it, thinking she wants to leave her family. He insists she's "smart enough for a girl" and it is too dangerous for her to be out in the city alone. After some crafty persuasion by his wife, Maria, Gus reluctantly permits Toula to attend classes. As her classes progress, Toula gains self-confidence. She trades her thick glasses for contact lenses and her baggy, drab clothes for flattering, colorful outfits. She updates her hairstyle and learns to apply makeup. With her new computer skills and polished image, Toula asks her mother and her Aunt Voula to convince Gus that Toula should work at Voula's travel agency instead of the restaurant.

text: Toula thrives in her new job, and one day she sees Ian walking by the travel agency. He notices Toula, not recognizing that she is the same woman who tried to talk to him at Dancing Zorba's. Despite Toula's lingering shyness, they introduce themselves and begin dating. When Ian realizes Toula was the woman at the restaurant, Toula is sure Ian will lose interest. Instead, he loves her even more for who she is, and they become a couple.

text: Because Ian is not Greek, Toula keeps the relationship secret from her family, but her parents find out when a family friend sees them kissing in a parking lot. As she feared, Gus is angry because Ian is not an ethnic Greek—referring to Ian as a "Xeno"—and both Gus and Maria tell Toula to end the relationship. Toula insists she loves Ian. Her parents try to dissuade her by bringing various Greek bachelors home to meet her, all to no avail.

text: When Ian proposes to Toula, she happily accepts, but Gus is upset that Ian did not ask him for permission to date Toula, let alone marry her. Ian tries to adapt to the family's Greek customs and mannerisms. Ian and Toula cannot marry in the Greek Orthodox Church unless Ian converts, and Toula is already worried the wedding will be a fiasco. She suggests to Ian that they elope instead. He refuses, saying if it's that important to her family to marry in their religion, then he will be baptized Greek Orthodox. Ian's willingness to do this encourages Gus and Maria to gradually accept Ian into the family.

text: As Toula feared, her numerous well-meaning female relatives take over much of the wedding plans, while the men keep testing Ian. Her cousin Nikki selects tacky bridesmaids dresses without Toula's permission; her brother Nick semi-jokingly threatens Ian that he'll kill him if he ever hurts Toula. Other cousins trick Ian into saying inappropriate things in Greek. When Toula invites Ian's quiet, reserved parents to meet her parents at their home, she insists that it be a simple dinner with just the six of them. Toula and Ian arrive to find all of Toula's extended family at the dinner, where they dance and drink for hours. Ian's parents are unaware of Greek culture and are shocked by the family's rambunctiousness.

text: On the wedding day, Toula is nervous and surrounded by relatives, but the traditional Greek wedding goes perfectly. At the reception, Gus gives a speech accepting Ian and his parents as family. He then presents the newlyweds with a deed to a house. Both Ian and Toula are deeply touched by Gus's generosity. Following the reception, Toula and Ian leave for a honeymoon in Greece, both appreciating the craziness of their Greek family.

text: An epilogue shows the couple's life six years later. Toula got pregnant "a minute later" after their honeymoon with their daughter Paris. As Ian and Toula are walking Paris from their house to Greek school, Paris asks why she has to go to Greek school. Toula replies that she had to go to Greek school as a child, so Paris will too. But she assures her that when the time comes, she can marry whomever she wants. As they walk, it is revealed that their home is next door to Toula's parents.

text: Cast[edit]

text:
Nia Vardalos as Fotoula "Toula" Portokalos-Miller
John Corbett as Ian Miller
Lainie Kazan as Maria Portokalos
Michael Constantine as Costas "Gus" Portokalos
Andrea Martin as Aunt Voula
Louis Mandylor as Nick Portokalos
Gia Carides as Cousin Nikki
Gerry Mendicino as Uncle Taki
Joey Fatone as Cousin Angelo
Bess Meisler as Yiayia (Grandma)
Stavroula Logothettis as Athena Portokalos
Ian Gomez as Mike, Ian's best man; he is Vardalos's real-life husband
Bruce Gray as Rodney Miller
Fiona Reid as Harriet Miller
Jayne Eastwood as Mrs. White
Arielle Sugarman as Paris Miller

tag: ul

text: Production[edit]

text: Development[edit]

text: My Big Fat Greek Wedding started as a one-woman play written by and starring Vardalos, performed for six weeks at the Hudson Backstage Theatre in Los Angeles in the summer of 1997.[5] Vardalos later jokingly stated that she only wrote the play "to get a better agent."[6][7] The play was based on Vardalos's own family in Winnipeg in Canada and on her experience marrying a non-Greek man (actor Ian Gomez).[6] The play was popular, and was sold out for much of its run, in part due to Vardalos's marketing it across Greek Orthodox churches in the area.[8] A number of Hollywood executives and celebrities saw it, including actress Rita Wilson, who is herself of Greek origin;[8] Wilson convinced her husband, actor Tom Hanks, to see it as well.

text: Vardalos began meeting various executives about making a film version of the play and began writing a screenplay as well. However, the meetings proved fruitless because the executives insisted on making changes that they felt would make the film more marketable, which Vardalos objected to: these included changing the plot, getting a known actress in the lead role (Marisa Tomei was one name mentioned),[8] and changing the family's ethnicity to Hispanic.[6] Two months after the play's initial run ended, Hanks's production company, Playtone, contacted Vardalos about producing a film based on her vision for it; they also agreed to remount the play in early 1998, this time at LA's Globe Theatre.[5] Hanks later said that casting Vardalos in the lead role "brings a huge amount of integrity to the piece, because it's Nia's version of her own life and her own experience. I think that shows through on the screen and people recognize it."[6]

text: In 2000, while in Toronto doing pre-production for the film, Vardalos and Playtone producer Gary Goetzman overheard actor John Corbett (who was in town shooting the film Serendipity) at a bar, telling a friend of his about having read the script for My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and being upset that he couldn't make the auditions. Vardalos and Goetzman approached Corbett and offered him the part of Ian Miller on the spot, which he accepted.[6]

text: Filming[edit]

text: Despite being based on life in the Greek community of Winnipeg, the film was set in Chicago and shot in both Toronto and Chicago. Toronto's Ryerson University and Greektown neighborhood feature prominently in the film. The home used to depict Gus and Maria Portokalos's residence (as well as the home bought next door at the end of the film for Toula and Ian) is located on Glenwood Crescent just off O'Connor Drive in East York. The real home representing the Portokalos' residence actually has most of the external ornamentation that was shown in the film. Also, some minor parts of the movie were shot at Jarvis Collegiate Institute in Toronto.

text: Release[edit]

text: After a February 2002 premiere, it was initially released in the United States via a limited release on April 19, 2002 before receiving a wider release worldwide over the summer, including a wide release in the United States on August 2.

text: Box office performance[edit]

text: My Big Fat Greek Wedding became a sleeper hit and grew steadily from its limited release. Despite never hitting the number one spot and being an independent film with a $5 million budget, it ultimately grossed over $368.7 million worldwide, becoming one of the top romantic films of the 21st century according to Echo Bridge Entertainment.[9] It was the fifth highest-grossing film of 2002 in the United States and Canada,[10] with USD$241,438,208, and the highest-grossing romantic comedy in history.[3] Domestically, it also held the record for the highest-grossing film never having been number one on the weekly North American box office charts,[11] until the release of the 2016 animated film, Sing, 14 years later. The film is among the most profitable of all time, with a 6150% return on a (inflation adjusted) cost of $6 million to produce.[12]

text: Critical reception[edit]

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating 76% based on 121 reviews, with an average rating of 6.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Though it sometimes feels like a television sitcom, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is good-hearted, lovable, and delightfully eccentric, with a sharp script and lead performance from Nia Vardalos."[13] On Metacritic, which assigns a rating based on reviews, the film has an average score of 62 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[14]

text: Accolades[edit]

text:
2008: AFI's 10 Top 10:
Nominated Romantic Comedy Film[15]

text: 10th-anniversary edition[edit]

text: In 2012, a 10th anniversary edition of the film was released via DVD and Blu-ray. The edition contains a digital copy of the film and features deleted scenes as well as a 30-minute retrospective with Vardalos and Corbett.

text: Lawsuit[edit]

text: The cast (with the exception of Vardalos, who had a separate deal), as well as Hanks’s production company, Playtone, later sued the studio for their part of the profits, charging that Gold Circle Films was engaging in so-called "Hollywood accounting" practices.[16]

text: Legacy[edit]

text: Television series[edit]

text: The film inspired the brief 2003 TV series My Big Fat Greek Life, with most of the major characters played by the same actors, with the exception of Steven Eckholdt replacing Corbett as the husband. Corbett had already signed on to the TV series Lucky. He was scheduled to appear as the best friend of his replacement's character, but the show was cancelled before he appeared. The show received poor reviews from critics noting the random character entrances and serious plot "adjustments" that did not match the film.

text: The seven episodes from the series are available on DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, whose TV studio division produced the show.

text: Sequel[edit]

text: In a 2009 interview for her film My Life in Ruins, asked about a possible sequel for My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Vardalos stated that she had an idea for a sequel and had started writing it, hinting that, like Ruins, the film would be set in Greece.[17]

text: Asked about a sequel again in a November 2012 interview, she stated:

text:
“

Well, actually, yes. And it's only now that I've really become open to the idea. Over the years, I've heard from everybody about what the sequel should be. People next to me at Starbucks would say, 'Hey, let me tell you my idea,' and I'd be like, 'Hey, I'm just trying to get a cup of coffee.' I never thought much about it. But then when John (Corbett) and I recently sat down to do that interview (for the 10th anniversary edition), we laughed so hard through the whole thing. It made me think that it's time. He said, "Come on, write something, will you?" And I now think I will. We have such an easy chemistry together. And we have chemistry because we never 'did it.' That's the surefire way to kill chemistry in a scene. You have to make sure your actors don't 'do it' off-screen. If they don't 'do it,' then they'll have chemistry on camera.[18]

”

text: On May 27, 2014, various news and media outlets reported that a sequel was in the works. Nia Vardalos later confirmed this via Twitter, and she also has written a script for the film.[19] The first trailer for My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 was aired on NBC's The Today Show on November 11, 2015 and it was released on March 25, 2016,[20] to mixed reviews from critics and modest box office success.


document_title: A Tale of Two Cities

question_text: how many books are in a tale of two cities

question_tokens: how many books are in a tale of two cities

root

text: A Tale of Two Cities

text: Synopsis[edit]

text: Book the First: Recalled to Life[edit]

text: Dickens's famous opening sentence introduces the universal approach of the book, the French Revolution, and the drama depicted within:

tag: p

text: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.[2]

text: In 1775, a man flags down the nightly mail-coach on its route from London to Dover. The man is Jerry Cruncher, an employee of Tellson's Bank in London; he carries a message for Jarvis Lorry, a passenger and one of the bank's managers. Mr. Lorry sends Jerry back to deliver a cryptic response to the bank: "Recalled to Life." The message refers to Alexandre Manette, a French physician who has been released from the Bastille after an 18-year imprisonment. Once Mr. Lorry arrives in Dover, he meets with Dr. Manette's daughter Lucie and her governess, Miss Pross. Lucie has believed her father to be dead, and faints at the news that he is alive; Mr. Lorry takes her to France to reunite with him.

text: In the Paris neighbourhood of Saint Antoine, Dr. Manette has been given lodgings by his former servant Ernest Defarge and his wife Therese, owners of a wine shop. Mr. Lorry and Lucie find him in a small garret, where he spends much of his time making shoes—a skill he learned in prison—which he uses to distract himself from his thoughts and which has become an obsession for him. He does not recognise Lucie at first but does eventually see the resemblance to her mother through her blue eyes and long golden hair, a strand of which he found on his sleeve when he was imprisoned. Mr. Lorry and Lucie take him back to England.

text: Book the Second: The Golden Thread[edit]

text: In 1780, French émigré Charles Darnay is on trial for treason against the British Crown. The key witnesses against him are two British spies, John Barsad and Roger Cly, who claim that Darnay gave information about British troops in North America to the French. Barsad states that he would recognise Darnay anywhere, at which point Darnay's defense counsel, Stryver, directs attention to Sydney Carton, a barrister present in the courtroom who looks almost identical to him. With Barsad's eyewitness testimony now discredited, Darnay is acquitted.

text: In Paris, the hated and abusive Marquis St. Evrémonde orders his carriage driven recklessly fast through the crowded streets, hitting and killing the child of Gaspard in Saint Antoine. The Marquis throws a coin to Gaspard to compensate him for his loss. Defarge, having observed the incident, comes forth to comfort the distraught father, saying the child would be worse off alive. This piece of wisdom pleases the Marquis, who throws a coin to Defarge also. As the Marquis departs, a coin is flung back into his carriage.

text: Arriving at his country château, the Marquis meets with his nephew and heir, Darnay. Out of disgust with his aristocratic family, Darnay has shed his real surname and adopted an anglicized version of his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais.[3] The following passage records the Marquis' principles of aristocratic superiority:

text: "Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend,"[citation needed] observed the Marquis, "will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof," looking up to it, "shuts out the sky."[4]

text: That night, Gaspard, who followed the Marquis to his château by riding on the underside of the carriage, stabs and kills him in his sleep. Gaspard leaves a note on the knife saying, "Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from JACQUES."[5] After nearly a year on the run, he is caught and hanged above the village well.

text: In London, Darnay gets Dr. Manette's permission[citation needed] to wed Lucie; but Carton confesses his love to Lucie as well. Knowing she will not love him in return, Carton promises to "embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you".[6] Stryver, the barrister who defended Darnay and with whom Carton has a working relationship, considers proposing marriage to Lucie, but Mr. Lorry talks him out of the idea.

text: On the morning of the marriage, Darnay reveals his real name and family lineage to Dr. Manette, a detail he had been asked to withhold until that day. In consequence, Dr. Manette reverts to his obsessive shoemaking after the couple leave for their honeymoon. He returns to sanity before their return, and the whole incident is kept secret from Lucie. Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross destroy the shoemaking bench and tools, which Dr. Manette had brought with him from Paris.

text: As time passes in England, Lucie and Charles begin to raise a family, a son (who dies in childhood) and a daughter, little Lucie. Mr. Lorry finds a second home and a sort of family with the Darnays. Stryver marries a rich widow with three children and becomes even more insufferable as his ambitions begin to be realized. Carton, even though he seldom visits, is accepted as a close friend of the family and becomes a special favourite of little Lucie.

text: In July 1789, the Defarges help to lead the storming of the Bastille, a symbol of royal tyranny. Defarge enters Dr. Manette's former cell, "One Hundred and Five, North Tower,"[7] and searches it thoroughly. Throughout the countryside, local officials and other representatives of the aristocracy are dragged from their homes to be killed, and the St. Evrémonde château is burned to the ground.

text: In 1792, Mr. Lorry decides to travel to Paris to collect important documents from the Tellson's branch in that city and bring them to London for safekeeping against the chaos of the French Revolution. Darnay intercepts a letter written by Gabelle, one of his uncle's servants who has been imprisoned by the revolutionaries, pleading for the Marquis to help secure his release. Without telling his family or revealing his position as the new Marquis, Darnay sets out for Paris.

text: Book the Third: The Track of a Storm[edit]

text: Shortly after Darnay arrives in Paris, he is denounced for being an emigrated aristocrat from France and jailed in La Force Prison.[8] Dr. Manette, Lucie, little Lucie, Jerry, and Miss Pross travel to Paris and meet Mr. Lorry to try to free Darnay. A year and three months pass, and Darnay is finally tried.

text: Dr Manette, viewed as a hero for his imprisonment in the Bastille, testifies on Darnay's behalf at his trial. Darnay is released, only to be arrested again later that day. A new trial begins on the following day, under new charges brought by the Defarges and a third individual who is soon revealed as Dr Manette. He had written an account of his imprisonment at the hands of Darnay's father and hidden it in his cell; Defarge found it while searching the cell during the storming of the Bastille.

text: While running errands with Jerry, Miss Pross is amazed to see her long-lost brother Solomon, but he does not want to be recognized in public. Carton suddenly steps forward from the shadows and identifies Solomon as Barsad, one of the spies who tried to frame Darnay for treason at his trial in 1780. Jerry remembers that he has seen Solomon with Cly, the other key witness at the trial and that Cly had faked his death to escape England. By threatening to denounce Solomon to the revolutionary tribunal as a Briton, Carton blackmails him into helping with a plan.

text: At the tribunal, Defarge identifies Darnay as the nephew of the dead Marquis St. Evrémonde and reads Dr Manette's letter. Defarge had learned Darnay's lineage from Solomon during the latter's visit to the wine shop several years earlier. The letter describes Dr Manette's imprisonment at the hands of Darnay's father and uncle for trying to report their crimes against a peasant family. Darnay's uncle had become infatuated with a girl, whom he had kidnapped and raped; despite Dr. Manette's attempt to save her, she died. The uncle killed her husband by working him to death, and her father died from a heart attack on being informed of what had happened. Before he died defending the family honour, the brother of the raped peasant had hidden the last member of the family, his younger sister. The Evrémonde brothers imprisoned Dr Manette after he refused their offer of a bribe to keep quiet. He concludes his letter by condemning the Evrémondes, "them and their descendants, to the last of their race."[9] Dr. Manette is horrified, but he is not allowed to retract his statement. Darnay is sent to the Conciergerie and sentenced to be guillotined the next day.

text: Carton wanders into the Defarge's wine shop, where he overhears Madame Defarge talking about her plans to have both Lucie and little Lucie condemned. Carton discovers that Madame Defarge was the surviving sister of the peasant family savaged by the Evrémondes.[10] At night, when Dr. Manette returns, shattered after spending the day in many failed attempts to save Darnay's life, he falls into an obsessive search for his shoemaking implements. Carton urges Lorry to flee Paris with Lucie, her father, and Little Lucie, asking them to leave as soon as he joins.

text: Shortly before the executions are to begin, Solomon sneaks Carton into the prison for a visit with Darnay. The two men trade clothes, and Carton drugs Darnay and has Solomon carry him out. Carton has decided to be executed in his place, which he is able to do because of their similar appearances, and has given his own identification papers to Mr Lorry to present on Darnay's behalf. Following Carton's earlier instructions, the family and Mr Lorry flee to England with the unconscious Darnay, who slowly comes to consciousness as they travel by stages to cross the waters to England.

text: Meanwhile, Madame Defarge, armed with a dagger and pistol, goes to the Manette residence, hoping to apprehend Lucie and little Lucie and bring them in for execution. However, the family is already gone and Miss Pross stays behind to confront and delay Madame Defarge. As the two women struggle, Madame Defarge's pistol discharges, killing her and causing Miss Pross to go permanently deaf from noise and shock.

text: The novel concludes with the guillotining of Carton. As he is waiting to board the tumbril, he is approached by a seamstress, also condemned to death, who mistakes him for Darnay (with whom she had been imprisoned earlier) but realises the truth once she sees him at close range. Awed by his unselfish courage and sacrifice, she asks to stay close to him and he agrees. Upon their arrival at the guillotine, Carton comforts her, telling her that their ends will be quick but that there is no Time or Trouble "in the better land where ... [they] will be mercifully sheltered", and she is able to meet her death in peace. Carton's unspoken last thoughts are prophetic:[11]

text: I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance [a lieutenant of Madame Defarge], the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.

text: I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man [Mr. Lorry], so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward.

text: I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both.

text: I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.

text: It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

text: After Carton tearfully hears the execution of the seamstress, his final thoughts flash in his mind as he is pushed towards the slot where the blade would fall.

text: Characters[edit]

text:
Sydney Carton: A quick-minded but depressed English barrister. Though he is portrayed in the beginning as a cynical alcoholic, he ultimately becomes a selfless hero.
Lucie Manette: An ideal pre-Victorian lady, perfect in every way. She is loved by both Carton and Charles Darnay (whom she marries) and is the daughter of Dr. Manette. She is the "golden thread" after whom Book the Second is named, so called because she holds her father's and her family's lives together (and because of her blond hair like her mother's). She also ties nearly every character in the book together.[12]
Charles Darnay: A young French noble of the Evrémonde family. In disgust at the cruelty of his family to the French peasantry, he took on the name "Darnay" (after his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais) and left France for England.[13] He exhibits an admirable honesty in his decision to reveal to Doctor Manette his true identity as a member of the infamous Evrémonde family. So, too, does he prove his courage in his decision to return to Paris at great personal risk to save the imprisoned Gabelle.
Dr. Alexandre Manette: Lucie's father, kept as a prisoner in the Bastille for eighteen years. Dr. Manette dies 12 years after Sydney Carton.
Monsieur Ernest Defarge: The owner of a French wine shop and leader of the Jacquerie; husband of Madame Defarge; servant to Dr. Manette as a youth. One of the key revolutionary leaders, he embraces the revolution as a noble cause, unlike many other revolutionaries.
Madame Therese Defarge: A vengeful female revolutionary, arguably the novel's antagonist. She is represented as a more extreme and bloodthirsty personality than her husband Ernest, in part because of the abuses visited on her peasant family by the aristocracy when she was a child.
Jacques One, Two, and Three: Revolutionary compatriots of Ernest Defarge. Jacques Three is especially bloodthirsty and serves as a juryman on the Revolutionary Tribunals.
The Vengeance: A companion of Madame Defarge referred to as her "shadow" and lieutenant, a member of the sisterhood of women revolutionaries in Saint Antoine, and revolutionary zealot. (Many Frenchmen and women did change their names to show their enthusiasm for the Revolution.[14]) Carton predicts that the Vengeance, Defarge, Cly, and Barsad will be consumed by the Revolution and end up on the guillotine.
The Mender of Roads: A peasant who later works as a woodsawyer and assists the Defarges.
Jarvis Lorry: An elderly manager at Tellson's Bank and a dear friend of Dr. Manette. He serves as a sort of trustee and guardian of the Manette family.
Miss Pross: Lucie Manette's governess since Lucie was ten years old. She is fiercely loyal to Lucie and to England.
Marquis St. Evrémonde:[15] The cruel uncle of Charles Darnay. Also called "The Younger". He inherited the title at "the Elder"'s death. Lamenting reforms which have imposed some restraints on the abusive powers of his class, the Marquis is out of favor at the royal court at the time of his assassination.
The Elder and his wife: The twin brother of the Marquis St. Evrémonde, referred to as "the Elder" (he held the title of Marquis St. Evrémonde at the time of Dr. Manette's arrest), and his wife, who fears him. They are the parents of Charles Darnay. Both are dead by the time the story begins.
John Barsad (real name Solomon Pross): An informer in London and later employed by the Marquis St. Evrémonde. Moving to Paris he takes service as a police spy in Saint Antoine, under the French monarchy. Following the revolution, he becomes an agent for revolutionary France (at which point he must hide his British identity). He is the long-lost brother of Miss Pross.
Roger Cly: Another spy, Barsad's collaborator.
Jerry Cruncher: Porter and messenger for Tellson's Bank and secret "Resurrection Man" (body-snatcher). His first name is short for Jeremiah; the latter name shares a meaning with the name of Jarvis Lorry.
Young Jerry Cruncher: Son of Jerry and Mrs. Cruncher. Young Jerry often follows his father around to his father's odd jobs, and at one point in the story, follows his father at night and discovers that his father is a resurrection man. Young Jerry looks up to his father as a role model and aspires to become a resurrection man himself when he grows up.
Mrs. Cruncher: Wife of Jerry Cruncher. She is a very religious woman, but her husband, somewhat paranoid, claims she is praying against him, and that is why he does not often succeed at work. She is often abused verbally, and, almost as often, physically, by Jerry, but at the end of the story, he appears to feel a bit guilty about this.
Mr. Stryver: An arrogant and ambitious barrister, senior to Sydney Carton.[16] There is a frequent misperception that Stryver's full name is "C. J. Stryver", but this is very unlikely. The mistake comes from a line in Book 2, Chapter 12: "After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer case could be."[17] The initials C. J. almost certainly refer to a legal title (probably "chief justice"); Stryver is imagining that he is playing every role in a trial in which he attempts to browbeat Lucie Manette into marrying him.
The Seamstress: A young woman caught up in The Terror. She precedes Sydney Carton, who comforts her, to the guillotine. She and Barsad are the only people in Paris who know Carton has taken Darnay's place.
Théophile Gabelle: Gabelle is "the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary, united"[18] for the tenants of the Marquis St. Evrémonde. Gabelle is imprisoned by the revolutionaries, and his beseeching letter brings Darnay to France. Gabelle is "named after the hated salt tax".[19]
Gaspard: Gaspard is the man whose son is run over by the Marquis. He then kills the Marquis and goes into hiding for a year. He eventually is found, arrested, and executed.
"Monseigneur": The appellation "Monseigneur" is used to refer to both a specific aristocrat in the novel and the general class of displaced aristocrats in England.
A peasant boy and his sister: Victims of the Marquis St. Evrémonde and his brother. They are revealed to be Madame Defarge's brother and sister.

text: Sources and publication[edit]

text: While performing in The Frozen Deep, Dickens was given a play to read called The Dead Heart by Watts Phillips which had the historical setting, the basic storyline, and the climax that Dickens used in A Tale of Two Cities.[20] The play was produced while A Tale of Two Cities was being serialized in All the Year Round and led to talk of plagiarism.[21]

text: Other sources are The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle (especially important for the novel's rhetoric and symbolism);[22] Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton; The Castle Spector by Matthew Lewis; Travels in France by Arthur Young; and Tableau de Paris by Louis-Sébastien Mercier. Dickens also used material from an account of imprisonment during the Terror by Beaumarchais, and records of the trial of a French spy published in The Annual Register.[23]

text: The 45-chapter novel was published in 31 weekly instalments in Dickens's new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. From April 1859 to November 1859, Dickens also republished the chapters as eight monthly sections in green covers. All but three of Dickens's previous novels had appeared only as monthly instalments. The first weekly instalment of A Tale of Two Cities ran in the first issue of All the Year Round on 30 April 1859. The last ran thirty weeks later, on 26 November.[1]

text: A Tale of Two Cities has been cited as one of the best-selling novels of all time. It has been stated to have sold 200 million copies since its first publication,[24][25][26] though this figure has been dismissed as "pure fiction" by Oxford University's Peter Thonemann.[27] As with other contenders for the title, such as Don Quixote and Three Musketeers, available sales figures are not reliable,[26] or indeed, for such public domain works, not available.[28]

text: Literary significance[edit]

text: Many of Dickens's characters are "flat", not "round", in the novelist E. M. Forster's famous terms, meaning roughly that they have only one mood.[29] For example, the Marquis is unremittingly wicked and relishes being so; Lucie is perfectly loving and supportive. As a corollary, Dickens often gives these characters verbal tics or visual quirks such as the dints in the nose of the Marquis. Forster believed that Dickens never truly created rounded characters.

text: Analysis[edit]

text: A Tale of Two Cities is one of only two works of historical fiction by Charles Dickens (the other being Barnaby Rudge).[30] Dickens relies much on The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle as a historical source.[22] Dickens wrote in his Preface to Tale that "no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book".[31]

text: Dickens uses literal translations of French idioms for characters who cannot speak English, such as "What the devil do you do in that galley there?!!" and "Where is my wife? ---Here you see me."[32] The Penguin Classics edition of the novel notes that "Not all readers have regarded the experiment as a success."[32]

text: J. L. Borges quipped: "Dickens lived in London. In his book A Tale of Two Cities, based on the French Revolution, we see that he really could not write a tale of two cities. He was a resident of just one city: London."[33]

text: Themes[edit]

text: Resurrection[edit]

text: In Dickens' England, resurrection always sat firmly in a Christian context. Most broadly, Sydney Carton is resurrected in spirit at the novel's close (even as he, paradoxically, gives up his physical life to save Darnay's.) More concretely, "Book the First" deals with the rebirth of Dr. Manette from the living death of his incarceration.

text: Resurrection appears for the first time when Mr. Lorry replies to the message carried by Jerry Cruncher with the words "Recalled to Life". Resurrection also appears during Mr. Lorry's coach ride to Dover, as he constantly ponders a hypothetical conversation with Dr. Manette: ("Buried how long?" "Almost eighteen years." ... "You know that you are recalled to life?" "They tell me so.") He believes he is helping with Dr. Manette's revival and imagines himself "digging" up Dr. Manette from his grave.

text: Resurrection is a major theme in the novel. In Jarvis Lorry's thoughts of Dr. Manette, resurrection is first spotted as a theme. It is also the last theme: Carton's sacrifice. Dickens originally wanted to call the entire novel Recalled to Life. (This instead became the title of the first of the novel's three "books".) Jerry is also part of the recurring theme: he himself is involved in death and resurrection in ways the reader does not yet know. The first piece of foreshadowing comes in his remark to himself: "You'd be in a blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!" The black humour of this statement becomes obvious only much later on. Five years later, one cloudy and very dark night (in June 1780[34]), Mr. Lorry reawakens the reader's interest in the mystery by telling Jerry it is "Almost a night ... to bring the dead out of their graves". Jerry responds firmly that he has never seen the night do that.[35]

text: It turns out that Jerry Cruncher's involvement with the theme of resurrection is that he is what the Victorians called a "Resurrection Man", one who (illegally) digs up dead bodies to sell to medical men (there was no legal way to procure cadavers for study at that time).[citation needed]

text: The opposite of resurrection is of course death. Death and resurrection appear often in the novel. Dickens is angered that in France and England, courts hand out death sentences for insignificant crimes. In France, peasants had formerly been put to death without any trial, at the whim of a noble.[36] The Marquis tells Darnay with pleasure that "[I]n the next room (my bedroom), one fellow ... was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—his daughter!"[37]

text: Interestingly, the demolition of Dr. Manette's shoe-making workbench by Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry is described as "the burning of the body".[38] It seems clear that this is a rare case where death or destruction (the opposite of resurrection) has a positive connotation since the "burning" helps liberate the doctor from the memory of his long imprisonment.[citation needed] But Dickens's description of this kind and healing act is strikingly odd:

text: So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.[39]

text: Sydney Carton's martyrdom atones for all his past wrongdoings. He even finds God during the last few days of his life, repeating Christ's soothing words, "I am the resurrection and the life".[40] Resurrection is the dominant theme of the last part of the novel.[citation needed] Darnay is rescued at the last moment and recalled to life; Carton chooses death and resurrection to a life better than that which he has ever known: "it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there ... he looked sublime and prophetic".

text: In the broadest sense, at the end of the novel, Dickens foresees a resurrected social order in France, rising from the ashes of the old one.[11]

text: Water[edit]

text: Hans Biedermann writes that water "is the fundamental symbol of all the energy of the unconscious—an energy that can be dangerous when it overflows its proper limits (a frequent dream sequence)."[41] This symbolism suits Dickens's novel; in A Tale of Two Cities, the frequent images of water stand for the building anger of the peasant mob, an anger that Dickens sympathizes with to a point, but ultimately finds irrational and even animalistic.[citation needed]

text: Early in the book, Dickens suggests this when he writes, "[T]he sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction."[42] The sea here represents the coming mob of revolutionaries. After Gaspard murders the Marquis, he is "hanged there forty feet high—and is left hanging, poisoning the water."[43] The poisoning of the well represents the bitter impact of Gaspard's execution on the collective feeling of the peasants.

text: After Gaspard's death, the storming of the Bastille is led (from the St. Antoine neighbourhood, at least) by the Defarges; "As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled around Defarge's wine shop, and every human drop in the cauldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex..."[44] The crowd is envisioned as a sea. "With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into a detested word [the word Bastille], the living sea rose, wave upon wave, depth upon depth, and overflowed the city..."[44]

text: Darnay's jailer is described as "unwholesomely bloated in both face and person, as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled with water." Later, during the Reign of Terror, the revolution had grown "so much more wicked and distracted ... that the rivers of the South were encumbered with bodies of the violently drowned by night..." Later a crowd is "swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets ... the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled them away."

text: During the fight with Miss Pross, Madame Defarge clings to her with "more than the hold of a drowning woman". Commentators on the novel have noted the irony that Madame Defarge is killed by her own gun, and perhaps Dickens means by the above quote to suggest that such vicious vengefulness as Madame Defarge's will eventually destroy even its perpetrators.

text: So many read the novel in a Freudian light, as exalting the (British) superego over the (French) id.[citation needed] Yet in Carton's last walk, he watches an eddy that "turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it onto the sea"—his fulfilment, while masochistic and superego-driven, is nonetheless an ecstatic union with the subconscious.

text: Darkness and light[edit]

text: As is frequent in European literature, good and evil are symbolized by light and darkness. Lucie Manette is the light, as represented literally by her name; and Madame Defarge is darkness. Darkness represents uncertainty, fear, and peril. It is dark when Mr. Lorry rides to Dover; it is dark in the prisons; dark shadows follow Madame Defarge; dark, gloomy doldrums disturb Dr. Manette; his capture and captivity are shrouded in darkness; the Marquis's estate is burned in the dark of night; Jerry Cruncher raids graves in the darkness; Charles's second arrest also occurs at night. Both Lucie and Mr. Lorry feel the dark threat that is Madame Defarge. "That dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me," remarks Lucie. Although Mr. Lorry tries to comfort her, "the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself". Madame Defarge is "like a shadow over the white road", the snow symbolising purity and Madame Defarge's darkness corruption. Dickens also compares the dark colour of blood to the pure white snow: the blood takes on the shade of the crimes of its shedders.

text: Social justice[edit]

text: Charles Dickens was a champion of the poor in his life and in his writings. His childhood included some of the pains of poverty in England, as he had to work in a factory as a child to help his family. His father, John Dickens, continually lived beyond his means and eventually went to debtors' prison. Charles was forced to leave school and began working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, earning six shillings a week.[citation needed]

text: Dickens considered the workings of a mob, in this novel and in Barnaby Rudge, creating believable characters who act differently when the mob mentality takes over. The reasons for revolution by the lower classes are clear, and given in the novel. Some of his characters, notably Madame Defarge, have no limit to their vengeance for crimes against them. The Reign of Terror was a horrific time in France, and she gives some notion for how things went too far from the perspective of the citizens, as opposed to the actions of the de facto government in that year. Dickens does not spare his descriptions of mob actions, including the night Dr Manette and his family arrive at Tellson's bank in Paris to meet Mr Lorry, saying that the people in the vicious crowd display "eyes which any unbrutalized beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun".[citation needed]

text: The reader is shown that the poor are brutalised in France and England alike.[citation needed] As crime proliferates, the executioner in England is "stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now hanging housebreaker ... now burning people in the hand" or hanging a broke man for stealing sixpence. In France, a boy is sentenced to have his hands removed and be burned alive, only because he did not kneel down in the rain before a parade of monks passing some fifty yards away. At the lavish residence of Monseigneur, we find "brazen ecclesiastics of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives ... Military officers destitute of military knowledge ... [and] Doctors who made great fortunes ... for imaginary disorders".[45] (This incident is fictional, but is based on a true story related by Voltaire in a famous pamphlet, An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de la Barre.)[46]

text: So riled is Dickens at the brutality of English law that he depicts some of its punishments with sarcasm: "the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action". He faults the law for not seeking reform: "Whatever is, is right" is the dictum of the Old Bailey.[47] The gruesome portrayal of quartering highlights its atrocity.

text: Dickens wants his readers to be careful that the same revolution that so damaged France will not happen in Britain, which (at least at the beginning of the book) is shown to be nearly as unjust as France; Ruth Glancy has argued that Dickens portrays France and England as nearly equivalent at the beginning of the novel, but that as the novel progresses, England comes to look better and better, climaxing in Miss Pross's pro-Britain speech at the end of the novel.[31] But his warning is addressed not to the British lower classes, but to the aristocracy. He repeatedly uses the metaphor of sowing and reaping; if the aristocracy continues to plant the seeds of a revolution through behaving unjustly, they can be certain of harvesting that revolution in time. The lower classes do not have any agency in this metaphor: they simply react to the behaviour of the aristocracy. In this sense it can be said that while Dickens sympathizes with the poor, he identifies with the rich: they are the book's audience, its "us" and not its "them". "Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind".[48]

text: With the people starving and begging the Marquis for food, his uncharitable response is to let the people eat grass; the people are left with nothing but onions to eat and are forced to starve while the nobles are living lavishly upon the people's backs. Every time the nobles refer to the life of the peasants it is only to destroy or humiliate the poor.

text: Autobiographical material[edit]

text: Some have argued that in A Tale of Two Cities Dickens reflects on his recently begun affair with eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan, which was possibly platonic but certainly romantic. Lucie Manette has been noted as resembling Ternan physically.[49]

text: After starring in a play by Wilkie Collins titled The Frozen Deep, Dickens was first inspired to write Tale. In the play, Dickens played the part of a man who sacrifices his own life so that his rival may have the woman they both love; the love triangle in the play became the basis for the relationships between Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, and Sydney Carton in Tale.[50]

text: Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay may also bear importantly on Dickens's personal life. The plot hinges on the near-perfect resemblance between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay; the two look so alike that Carton twice saves Darnay through the inability of others to tell them apart. Carton is Darnay made bad. Carton suggests as much:

text: 'Do you particularly like the man [Darnay]?' he muttered, at his own image [which he is regarding in a mirror]; 'why should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have made in yourself! A good reason for talking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen away from and what you might have been! Change places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes [belonging to Lucie Manette] as he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.'[51]

text: Many have felt that Carton and Darnay are doppelgängers, which Eric Rabkin defines as a pair "of characters that together, represent one psychological persona in the narrative".[52] If so, they would prefigure such works as Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Darnay is worthy and respectable but dull (at least to most modern readers), Carton disreputable but magnetic.[citation needed]

text: One can only suspect whose psychological persona it is that Carton and Darnay together embody (if they do), but it is often thought to be the psyche of Dickens himself. Dickens might have been quite aware that between them, Carton and Darnay shared his own initials, a frequent property of his characters.[53] However, he denied it when asked.

text: Setting[edit]

text: Research published in The Dickensian in 1963 suggests that the house at 1 Greek Street, now The House of St Barnabas, forms the basis for Dr Manette and Lucie's London house.[54]

text: In a building at the back, attainable by a courtyard where a plane tree rustled its green leaves, church organs claimed to be made, and likewise gold to be beaten by some mysterious giant who had a golden arm starting out of the wall... as if he had beaten himself precious.[55]

text: The "golden arm" (an arm-and-hammer symbol, an ancient sign of the gold-beater's craft) now resides at the Charles Dickens Museum but you could have seen a modern replica sticking out of the wall near the Pillars of Hercules pub at the western end of Manette Street (formerly Rose Street)[56], until this building was demolished in 2017.

text: Adaptations[edit]

text: Films[edit]

text:
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1911 silent film.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1917 silent film.
A Tale of Two Ci.ties, a 1922 silent film.
The Only Way, a 1927 silent British film directed by Herbert Wilcox.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1935 black-and-white MGM film starring Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone, and Edna May Oliver. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1958 version, starring Dirk Bogarde, Dorothy Tutin, Christopher Lee, Leo McKern, and Donald Pleasence.

text: Radio[edit]

text:
On 25 July 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air produced a radio adaptation starring Orson Welles. Welles also starred in a version broadcast on Lux Radio Theater on 26 March 1945.
In 1945, a portion of the novel was adapted to the syndicated programme The Weird Circle as "Dr. Manette's Manuscript."
In 1950, The BBC broadcast a radio adaptation by Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud of their unproduced 1935 stage play.
A half-hour version titled "Sydney Carton" was broadcast on 27 March 1954, on Theatre Royal hosted by and starring Laurence Olivier.
In June 1989, BBC Radio 4 produced a seven-hour drama adapted for radio by Nick McCarty and directed by Ian Cotterell. This adaptation has been occasionally repeated by BBC Radio 7 (most recently in 2009).
In December 2011, as part of its special season on Charles Dickens' Bicentenerary,[57] BBC Radio 4 produced a new five-part adaptation for radio by Mike Walker with original music by Lennert Busch and directed by Jessica Dromgoole and Jeremy Mortimer[58] which won the 2012 Bronze Sony Radio Academy Award for Best Drama.[59]

text: Television[edit]

text:
ABC produced a two-part mini-series in 1953.[60]
The BBC produced an eight-part mini-series in 1957 starring Peter Wyngarde as Sydney Carton, Edward de Souza as Charles Darnay, and Wendy Hutchinson as Lucie Manette.
The BBC produced a ten-part mini-series in 1965.
The BBC produced another eight-part mini-series in 1980 starring Paul Shelley as Carton/Darnay, Sally Osborne as Lucie Manette, and Nigel Stock as Jarvis Lorry.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1980 version for TV, starring Chris Sarandon, Peter Cushing, Alice Krige, and Billie Whitelaw.
ITV Granada produced a two-part mini-series in 1989 starting James Wilby as Sydney Carton, Xavier Deluc as Charles Darnay, and Serena Gordon as Lucie Manette. The production also aired on Masterpiece Theatre on the PBS in the United States.
Plans for a new TV adaptation were announced at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

text: Stage productions[edit]

text:
Royal & Derngate Theatre produced an adaptation of Tale of Two Cities by Mike Poulton with original music by Rachel Portman, directed by James Dacre.
The Regent's Park Open Air Theatre is to stage a new adaptation of Tale of Two Cities by Matthew Dunster as part of their 2017 season, which will be directed by Artistic Director Timothy Sheader.

text: Stage musicals[edit]

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tag: table

text:
A 1968 stage version, Two Cities, the Spectacular New Musical, with music by Jeff Wayne, lyrics by Jerry Wayne and starring Edward Woodward.
In 1997, Paul Nicholas commissioned an adaptation with music by David Pomeranz and book by Steven David Horwich and David Soames. Co-produced by Bill Kenwright, the show ran at the New Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham during their 1998 Christmas season with Paul Nicholas as Sydney Carton.
In 2008, Jill Santoriello wrote a new musical theatre adaptation.

text: Opera[edit]

text: Arthur Benjamin's operatic version of the novel, subtitled Romantic Melodrama in six scenes, was premiered by the BBC on 17 April 1953, conducted by the composer; it received its stage premiere at Sadler's Wells on 22 July 1957, under the baton of Leon Lovett.[61]

text: Books[edit]

text: Dav Pilkey wrote a comic called 'Dog Man, A Tale Of Two Kittys' which was loosely based off the novel.

text: Popular culture[edit]

text: In United States politics, at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, the keynote speaker Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York delivered a scathing criticism of then-President Ronald Reagan's comparison of the United States to a "shining city on a hill", saying: "Mr. President, you ought to know that this nation is more a 'Tale of Two Cities' than it is just a 'Shining City on a Hill'."[62][63]

text: A Tale of Two Cities served as inspiration to the 2012 Batman film The Dark Knight Rises by Christopher Nolan. The character of Bane is in part inspired by Dickens' Madame Defarge: he organises kangaroo court trials against the ruling elite of the city of Gotham and is seen knitting in one of the trial scenes like Madame Defarge. There are other hints to Dickens' novel, such as Talia al Ghul being obsessed with revenge and having a close relationship to the hero, Bane's catchphrase "the fire rises" as an ode to one of the book's chapters, among others.[64]


document_title: The Sun Also Rises

question_text: when does the sun also rises take place

question_tokens: when does the sun also rises take place

text: The Sun Also Rises

text: Background[edit]

text: In the 1920s Hemingway lived in Paris, was foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and traveled to places such as Smyrna to report about the Greco–Turkish War. He wanted to use his journalism experience to write fiction, believing that a story could be based on real events when a writer distilled his own experiences in such a way that, according to biographer Jeffrey Meyers, "what he made up was truer than what he remembered".[5]

text: With his wife Hadley Richardson, Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, in 1923, where he was following his recent passion for bullfighting.[6] The couple returned to Pamplona in 1924—enjoying the trip immensely—this time accompanied by Chink Dorman-Smith, John Dos Passos, and Donald Ogden Stewart and his wife.[7] The two returned a third time in June 1925 and stayed at the hotel of his friend Juanito Quintana. That year, they brought with them a different group of American and British expatriates: Hemingway's Michigan boyhood friend Bill Smith, Stewart, recently divorced Duff, Lady Twysden, her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb.[8] In Pamplona, the group quickly disintegrated. Hemingway, attracted to Duff, was jealous of Loeb, who had recently been on a romantic getaway with her; by the end of the week the two men had a public fistfight. Against this background was the influence of the young matador from Ronda, Cayetano Ordóñez, whose brilliance in the bullring affected the spectators. Ordóñez honored Hemingway's wife by presenting her, from the bullring, with the ear of a bull he killed. Outside of Pamplona, the fishing trip to the Irati River (near Burguete in Navarre) was marred by polluted water.[8]

text: Hemingway had intended to write a nonfiction book about bullfighting, but then decided that the week's experiences had presented him with enough material for a novel.[7] A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday (21 July), he began writing what would eventually become The Sun Also Rises.[9] By 17 August, with 14 chapters written and a working title of Fiesta chosen, Hemingway returned to Paris. He finished the draft on 21 September 1925, writing a foreword the following weekend and changing the title to The Lost Generation.[10]

text: A few months later, in December 1925, Hemingway and his wife spent the winter in Schruns, Austria, where he began revising the manuscript extensively. Pauline Pfeiffer joined them in January, and—against Richardson's advice—urged him to sign a contract with Scribner's. Hemingway left Austria for a quick trip to New York to meet with the publishers, and on his return, during a stop in Paris, began an affair with Pauline. He returned to Schruns to finish the revisions in March.[11] In June, he was in Pamplona with both Richardson and Pfeiffer. On their return to Paris, Richardson asked for a separation, and left for the south of France.[12] In August, alone in Paris, Hemingway completed the proofs, dedicating the novel to his wife and son.[13] After the publication of the book in October, Richardson asked for a divorce; Hemingway subsequently gave her the book's royalties.[14]

text: Publication history[edit]

text: Hemingway apparently maneuvered Boni & Liveright into terminating their contract so he could have The Sun Also Rises published by Scribner's instead. In December 1925 he quickly wrote The Torrents of Spring—a satirical novella attacking Sherwood Anderson—and sent it to his publishers Boni & Liveright. His three-book contract with them included a termination clause should they reject a single submission. Unamused by the satire against one of their most saleable authors, Boni & Liveright immediately rejected it and terminated the contract.[15] Within weeks Hemingway signed a contract with Scribner's, who agreed to publish The Torrents of Spring and all of his subsequent work.[16][note 1]

text: Scribner's published the novel on 22 October 1926. Its first edition consisted of 5090 copies, selling at $2.00 per copy.[17] Cleonike Damianakes illustrated the dust jacket with a Hellenistic design of a seated, robed woman, her head bent to her shoulder, eyes closed, one hand holding an apple, her shoulders and a thigh exposed. Editor Maxwell Perkins intended "Cleon's respectably sexy"[1] design to attract "the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels".[18] Two months later the book was in a second printing with 7000 copies sold. Subsequent printings were ordered; by 1928, after the publication of Hemingway's short story collection Men Without Women, the novel was in its eighth printing.[19][20] In 1927 the novel was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape, titled Fiesta, without the two epigraphs.[21] Two decades later, in 1947, Scribner's released three of Hemingway's works as a boxed set, including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.[22]

text: By 1983, The Sun Also Rises had been in print continuously since its publication in 1926, and was likely one of the most translated titles in the world. At that time Scribner's began to print cheaper mass-market paperbacks of the book, in addition to the more expensive trade paperbacks already in print.[23] In the 1990s, British editions were titled Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises.[24] In 2006 Simon & Schuster began to produce audiobook versions of Hemingway's novels, including The Sun Also Rises.[25]

text: Plot summary[edit]

text: On the surface, the novel is a love story between the protagonist Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has made him impotent—and the promiscuous divorcée usually identified as Lady Brett Ashley. Barnes is an expatriate American journalist living in Paris, while Brett is a twice-divorced Englishwoman with bobbed hair and numerous love affairs, and embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. Brett's affair with Robert Cohn causes Jake to be upset and break off his friendship with Cohn; her seduction of the 19-year-old matador Romero causes Jake to lose his good reputation among the Spaniards in Pamplona.

text: Book One is set in the café society of young American expatriates in Paris. In the opening scenes, Jake plays tennis with his college friend Robert Cohn, picks up a prostitute (Georgette), and runs into Brett and Count Mippipopolous in a nightclub. Later, Brett tells Jake she loves him, but they both know that they have no chance at a stable relationship.

text: In Book Two, Jake is joined by Bill Gorton, recently arrived from New York, and Brett's fiancé Mike Campbell, who arrives from Scotland. Jake and Bill travel south and meet Robert Cohn at Bayonne for a fishing trip in the hills northeast of Pamplona. Instead of fishing, Cohn stays in Pamplona to wait for the overdue Brett and Mike. Cohn had an affair with Brett a few weeks earlier and still feels possessive of her despite her engagement to Mike. After Jake and Bill enjoy five days of fishing the streams near Burguete, they rejoin the group in Pamplona.

text: All begin to drink heavily. Cohn is resented by the others, who taunt him with anti-semitic remarks. During the fiesta the characters drink, eat, watch the running of the bulls, attend bullfights, and bicker with each other. Jake introduces Brett to the 19-year-old matador Romero at the Hotel Montoya; she is smitten with him and seduces him. The jealous tension among the men builds—Jake, Campbell, Cohn, and Romero each want Brett. Cohn, who had been a champion boxer in college, has a fistfight with Jake and Mike, and another with Romero, whom he beats up. Despite his injuries, Romero continues to perform brilliantly in the bullring.

text: Book Three shows the characters in the aftermath of the fiesta. Sober again, they leave Pamplona; Bill returns to Paris, Mike stays in Bayonne, and Jake goes to San Sebastián on the northern coast of Spain. As Jake is about to return to Paris, he receives a telegram from Brett asking for help; she had gone to Madrid with Romero. He finds her there in a cheap hotel, without money, and without Romero. She announces she has decided to go back to Mike. The novel ends with Jake and Brett in a taxi speaking of the things that might have been.

text: Major themes[edit]

text: Paris and the Lost Generation[edit]

text: The first book of The Sun Also Rises is set in mid-1920s Paris. Americans were drawn to Paris in the Roaring Twenties by the favorable exchange rate, with as many as 200,000 English-speaking expatriates living there. The Paris Tribune reported in 1925 that Paris had an American Hospital, an American Library, and an American Chamber of Commerce.[26] Many American writers were disenchanted with the US, where they found less artistic freedom than in Europe. (For example, Hemingway was in Paris during the period when Ulysses, written by his friend James Joyce, was banned and burned in New York.)[27]

text: The themes of The Sun Also Rises appear in its two epigraphs. The first is an allusion to the "Lost Generation," a term coined by Gertrude Stein referring to the post-war generation;[note 2][28] the other epigraph is a long quotation from Ecclesiastes: "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose."[29] Hemingway told his editor Max Perkins that the book was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever." He thought the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.[4]

text: Hemingway scholar Wagner-Martin writes that Hemingway wanted the book to be about morality, which he emphasized by changing the working title from Fiesta to The Sun Also Rises. Wagner-Martin claims that the book can be read either as a novel about bored expatriates or as a morality tale about a protagonist who searches for integrity in an immoral world.[30] Months before Hemingway left for Pamplona, the press was depicting the Parisian Latin Quarter, where he lived, as decadent and depraved. He began writing the story of a matador corrupted by the influence of the Latin Quarter crowd; he expanded it into a novel about Jake Barnes at risk of being corrupted by wealthy and inauthentic expatriates.[31]

text: The characters form a group, sharing similar norms, and each greatly affected by the war.[30] Hemingway captures the angst of the age and transcends the love story of Brett and Jake, although they are representative of the period: Brett is starved for reassurance and love and Jake is sexually maimed. His wound symbolizes the disability of the age, the disillusion, and the frustrations felt by an entire generation.[30]

text: Hemingway thought he lost touch with American values while living in Paris, but his biographer Michael Reynolds claims the opposite, seeing evidence of the author's midwestern American values in the novel. Hemingway admired hard work. He portrayed the matadors and the prostitutes, who work for a living, in a positive manner, but Brett, who prostitutes herself, is emblematic of "the rotten crowd" living on inherited money. It is Jake, the working journalist, who pays the bills again and again when those who can pay do not. Hemingway shows, through Jake's actions, his disapproval of the people who did not pay up.[32] Reynolds says that Hemingway shows the tragedy, not so much of the decadence of the Montparnasse crowd, but of the decline in American values of the period. As such, the author created an American hero who is impotent and powerless. Jake becomes the moral center of the story. He never considers himself part of the expatriate crowd because he is a working man; to Jake a working man is genuine and authentic, and those who do not work for a living spend their lives posing.[33]

text: Women and love[edit]

text: The twice-divorced Brett Ashley represented the liberated New Woman (in the 1920s, divorces were common and easy to be had in Paris).[34] James Nagel writes that, in Brett, Hemingway created one of the more fascinating women in 20th-century American literature. Sexually promiscuous, she is a denizen of Parisian nightlife and cafés. In Pamplona she sparks chaos: in her presence, the men drink too much and fight. She also seduces the young bullfighter Romero and becomes a Circe in the festival.[35] Critics describe her variously as complicated, elusive, and enigmatic; Donald Daiker writes that Hemingway "treats her with a delicate balance of sympathy and antipathy."[36] She is vulnerable, forgiving, independent—qualities that Hemingway juxtaposes with the other women in the book, who are either prostitutes or overbearing nags.[37]

text: Nagel considers the novel a tragedy. Jake and Brett have a relationship that becomes destructive because their love cannot be consummated. Conflict over Brett destroys Jake's friendship with Robert Cohn, and her behavior in Pamplona affects Jake's hard-won reputation among the Spaniards.[35] Meyers sees Brett as a woman who wants sex without love while Jake can only give her love without sex. Although Brett sleeps with many men, it is Jake she loves.[38] Dana Fore writes that Brett is willing to be with Jake in spite of his disability, in a "non-traditional erotic relationship."[39] Other critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Nina Baym see her as a supreme bitch; Fiedler sees Brett as one of the "outstanding examples of Hemingway's 'bitch women.'"[40][41] Jake becomes bitter about their relationship, as when he says, "Send a girl off with a man .... Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love."[42]

text: Critics interpret the Jake–Brett relationship in various ways. Daiker suggests that Brett's behavior in Madrid—after Romero leaves and when Jake arrives at her summons—reflects her immorality.[43] Scott Donaldson thinks Hemingway presents the Jake–Brett relationship in such a manner that Jake knew "that in having Brett for a friend 'he had been getting something for nothing' and that sooner or later he would have to pay the bill."[44] Daiker notes that Brett relies on Jake to pay for her train fare from Madrid to San Sebastián, where she rejoins her fiancé Mike.[45] In a piece Hemingway cut, he has Jake thinking, "you learned a lot about a woman by not sleeping with her."[46] By the end of the novel, although Jake loves Brett, he appears to undergo a transformation in Madrid when he begins to distance himself from her.[46] Reynolds believes that Jake represents the "everyman," and that in the course of the narrative he loses his honor, faith, and hope. He sees the novel as a morality play with Jake as the person who loses the most.[47]

text: The corrida, the fiesta, and nature[edit]

text: In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway contrasts Paris with Pamplona, and the frenzy of the fiesta with the tranquillity of the Spanish countryside. Spain was Hemingway's favorite European country; he considered it a healthy place, and the only country "that hasn't been shot to pieces."[48] He was profoundly affected by the spectacle of bullfighting, writing,

text: It isn't just brutal like they always told us. It's a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could. It's just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you.[48]

text: He demonstrated what he considered the purity in the culture of bullfighting—called afición—and presented it as an authentic way of life, contrasted against the inauthenticity of the Parisian bohemians.[49] To be accepted as an aficionado was rare for a non-Spaniard; Jake goes through a difficult process to gain acceptance by the "fellowship of afición."[50]

text: The Hemingway scholar Allen Josephs thinks the novel is centered on the corrida (the bullfighting), and how each character reacts to it. Brett seduces the young matador; Cohn fails to understand and expects to be bored; Jake understands fully because only he moves between the world of the inauthentic expatriates and the authentic Spaniards; the hotel keeper Montoya is the keeper of the faith; and Romero is the artist in the ring—he is both innocent and perfect, and the one who bravely faces death.[51] The corrida is presented as an idealized drama in which the matador faces death, creating a moment of existentialism or nada (nothingness), broken when he vanquishes death by killing the bull.[52]

text: Hemingway presents matadors as heroic characters dancing in a bullring. He considered the bullring as war with precise rules, in contrast to the messiness of the real war that he, and by extension Jake, experienced.[30] Critic Keneth Kinnamon notes that young Romero is the novel's only honorable character.[50] Hemingway named Romero after Pedro Romero, an 18th-century bullfighter who killed thousands of bulls in the most difficult manner: having the bull impale itself on his sword as he stood perfectly still. Reynolds says Romero, who symbolizes the classically pure matador, is the "one idealized figure in the novel."[53] Josephs says that when Hemingway changed Romero's name from Guerrita and imbued him with the characteristics of the historical Romero, he also changed the scene in which Romero kills a bull to one of recibiendo (receiving the bull) in homage to the historical namesake.[54]

text: Before the group arrives in Pamplona, Jake and Bill take a fishing trip to the Irati River. As Harold Bloom points out, the scene serves as an interlude between the Paris and Pamplona sections, "an oasis that exists outside linear time." More importantly, on another level it reflects "the mainstream of American fiction beginning with the Pilgrims seeking refuge from English oppression"—the prominent theme in American literature of escaping into the wilderness, as seen in Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Thoreau.[55] Fiedler calls the theme "The Sacred Land"; he thinks the American West is evoked in The Sun Also Rises by the Pyrenees and given a symbolic nod with the name of the "Hotel Montana."[40] In Hemingway's writing, nature is a place of refuge and rebirth, according to Stoltzfus, where the hunter or fisherman gains a moment of transcendence at the moment the prey is killed.[52] Nature is the place where men act without women: men fish, men hunt, men find redemption.[40] In nature Jake and Bill do not need to discuss the war because their war experience, paradoxically, is ever-present. The nature scenes serve as counterpoint to the fiesta scenes.[30]

text: All of the characters drink heavily during the fiesta and generally throughout the novel. In his essay "Alcoholism in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises," Matts Djos says the main characters exhibit alcoholic tendencies such as depression, anxiety and sexual inadequacy. He writes that Jake's self-pity is symptomatic of an alcoholic, as is Brett's out-of-control behavior.[56] William Balassi thinks that Jake gets drunk to avoid his feelings for Brett, notably in the Madrid scenes at the end where he has three martinis before lunch and drinks three bottles of wine with lunch.[57] Reynolds, however, believes the drinking is relevant as set against the historical context of Prohibition in the United States. The atmosphere of the fiesta lends itself to drunkenness, but the degree of revelry among the Americans also reflects a reaction against Prohibition. Bill, visiting from the US, drinks in Paris and in Spain. Jake is rarely drunk in Paris where he works but on vacation in Pamplona, he drinks constantly. Reynolds says that Prohibition split attitudes about morality, and in the novel Hemingway made clear his dislike of Prohibition.[58]

text: Masculinity and gender[edit]

text: Critics have seen Jake as an ambiguous representative of Hemingway manliness. For example, in the bar scene in Paris, Jake is angry at some homosexual men. The critic Ira Elliot suggests that Hemingway viewed homosexuality as an inauthentic way of life, and that he aligns Jake with homosexual men because, like them, Jake does not have sex with women. Jake's anger shows his self-hatred at his inauthenticity and lack of masculinity.[59] His sense of masculine identity is lost—he is less than a man.[60] Elliot wonders if Jake's wound perhaps signifies latent homosexuality, rather than only a loss of masculinity; the emphasis in the novel, however, is on Jake's interest in women.[61] Hemingway's writing has been called homophobic because of the language his characters use. For example, in the fishing scenes, Bill confesses his fondness for Jake but then goes on to say, "I couldn't tell you that in New York. It'd mean I was a faggot."[62]

text: In contrast to Jake's troubled masculinity, Romero represents an ideal masculine identity grounded in self-assurance, bravery, competence, and uprightness. The Davidsons note that Brett is attracted to Romero for these reasons, and they speculate that Jake might be trying to undermine Romero's masculinity by bringing Brett to him and thus diminishing his ideal stature.[63]

text: Critics have examined issues of gender misidentification that are prevalent in much of Hemingway's work. He was interested in cross-gender themes, as shown by his depictions of effeminate men and boyish women.[64] In his fiction, a woman's hair is often symbolically important and used to denote gender. Brett, with her short hair, is androgynous and compared to a boy—yet the ambiguity lies in the fact that she is described as a "damned fine-looking woman." While Jake is attracted to this ambiguity, Romero is repulsed by it. In keeping with his strict moral code he wants a feminine partner and rejects Brett because, among other things, she will not grow her hair.

text: Anti-semitism[edit]

text:
Mike lay on the bed looking like a death mask of himself. He opened his eyes and looked at me.
'Hello Jake' he said very slowly. 'I'm getting a little sleep. I've wanted a little sleep for a long time ....'
'You'll sleep, Mike. Don't worry, boy.'
'Brett's got a bullfighter,' Mike said. 'But her Jew has gone away .... Damned good thing, what?'

— The Sun Also Rises [65]

text: Hemingway has been called anti-Semitic, most notably because of the characterization of Robert Cohn in the book. The other characters often refer to Cohn as a Jew, and once as a 'kike'.[66] Shunned by the other members of the group, Cohn is characterized as "different," unable or unwilling to understand and participate in the fiesta.[66] Cohn is never really part of the group—separated by his difference or his Jewish faith.[30] Critic Susan Beegel goes so far as to claim, "Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a Jew, not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character who is unattractive because he is a Jew."[67] Hemingway critic Josephine Knopf speculates that Hemingway might have wanted to depict Cohn as a "shlemiel" (or fool), but she points out that Cohn lacks the characteristics of a traditional shlemiel.[68]

text: Cohn is based on Harold Loeb, a fellow writer who rivaled Hemingway for the affections of Duff, Lady Twysden (the real-life inspiration for Brett). Biographer Michael Reynolds writes that in 1925, Loeb should have declined Hemingway's invitation to join them in Pamplona. Before the trip he was Duff's lover and Hemingway's friend; during the fiasco of the fiesta, he lost Duff and Hemingway's friendship. Hemingway used Loeb as the basis of a character remembered chiefly as a "rich Jew."[69]

text: Writing style[edit]

text: The novel is well known for its style, which is variously described as modern, hard-boiled, or understated.[70] As a novice writer and journalist in Paris, Hemingway turned to Ezra Pound—who had a reputation as "an unofficial minister of culture who acted as mid-wife for new literary talent"—to mark and blue-ink his short stories.[71] From Pound, Hemingway learned to write in the modernist style: he used understatement, pared away sentimentalism, and presented images and scenes without explanations of meaning, most notably at the book's conclusion, in which multiple future possibilities are left for Brett and Jake.[70][note 3] The scholar Anders Hallengren writes that because Hemingway learned from Pound to "distrust adjectives," he created a style "in accordance with the esthetics and ethics of raising the emotional temperature towards the level of universal truth by shutting the door on sentiment, on the subjective."[72]

text: F. Scott Fitzgerald told Hemingway to "let the book's action play itself out among its characters." Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin writes that, in taking Fitzgerald's advice, Hemingway produced a novel without a central narrator: "Hemingway's book was a step ahead; it was the modernist novel."[73] When Fitzgerald advised Hemingway to trim at least 2500 words from the opening sequence, which was 30 pages long, Hemingway wired the publishers telling them to cut the opening 30 pages altogether. The result was a novel without a focused starting point, which was seen as a modern perspective and critically well received.[74]

text:
Each time he let the bull pass so close that the man and the bull and the cape that filled and pivoted ahead of the bull were all one sharply etched mass. It was all so slow and so controlled. It was as though he were rocking the bull to sleep. He made four veronicas like that ... and came away toward the applause, his hand on his hip, his cape on his arm, and the bull watching his back going away.

—bullfighting scene from The Sun Also Rises [75]

text: Wagner-Martin speculates that Hemingway may have wanted to have a weak or negative hero as defined by Edith Wharton, but he had no experience creating a hero or protagonist. At that point his fiction consisted of extremely short stories, not one of which featured a hero.[30] The hero changed during the writing of The Sun Also Rises: first the matador was the hero, then Cohn was the hero, then Brett, and finally Hemingway realized "maybe there is not any hero at all. Maybe a story is better without any hero."[76] Balassi believes that in eliminating other characters as the protagonist, Hemingway brought Jake indirectly into the role of the novel's hero.[77]

text: As a roman à clef, the novel based its characters on living people, causing scandal in the expatriate community. Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker writes that "word-of-mouth of the book" helped sales. Parisian expatriates gleefully tried to match the fictional characters to real identities. Moreover, he writes that Hemingway used prototypes easily found in the Latin Quarter on which to base his characters.[78] The early draft identified the characters by their living counterparts; Jake's character was called Hem, and Brett's was called Duff.[79]

text: Although the novel is written in a journalistic style, Frederic Svoboda writes that the striking thing about the work is "how quickly it moves away from a simple recounting of events."[80] Jackson Benson believes that Hemingway used autobiographical details as framing devices for life in general. For example, Benson says that Hemingway drew out his experiences with "what if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?"[81] Hemingway believed that the writer could describe one thing while an entirely different thing occurs below the surface—an approach he called the iceberg theory, or the theory of omission.[82]

text:
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

—Hemingway explained the iceberg theory in Death in the Afternoon (1932).[83]

text: Balassi says Hemingway applied the iceberg theory better in The Sun Also Rises than in any of his other works, by editing extraneous material or purposely leaving gaps in the story. He made editorial remarks in the manuscript that show he wanted to break from the stricture of Gertrude Stein's advice to use "clear restrained writing." In the earliest draft, the novel begins in Pamplona, but Hemingway moved the opening setting to Paris because he thought the Montparnasse life was necessary as a counterpoint to the later action in Spain. He wrote of Paris extensively, intending "not to be limited by the literary theories of others, [but] to write in his own way, and possibly, to fail."[84] He added metaphors for each character: Mike's money problems, Brett's association with the Circe myth, Robert's association with the segregated steer.[85] It wasn't until the revision process that he pared down the story, taking out unnecessary explanations, minimizing descriptive passages, and stripping the dialogue, all of which created a "complex but tightly compressed story."[86]

text: Hemingway said that he learned what he needed as a foundation for his writing from the style sheet for The Kansas City Star, where he worked as cub reporter.[note 4][87] The critic John Aldridge says that the minimalist style resulted from Hemingway's belief that to write authentically, each word had to be carefully chosen for its simplicity and authenticity and carry a great deal of weight. Aldridge writes that Hemingway's style "of a minimum of simple words that seemed to be squeezed onto the page against a great compulsion to be silent, creates the impression that those words—if only because there are so few of them—are sacramental."[88] In Paris Hemingway had been experimenting with the prosody of the King James Bible, reading aloud with his friend John Dos Passos. From the style of the biblical text, he learned to build his prose incrementally; the action in the novel builds sentence by sentence, scene by scene and chapter by chapter.[30]

text: The simplicity of his style is deceptive. Bloom writes that it is the effective use of parataxis that elevates Hemingway's prose. Drawing on the Bible, Walt Whitman and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway wrote in deliberate understatement and he heavily incorporated parataxis, which in some cases almost becomes cinematic.[90] His skeletal sentences were crafted in response to Henry James's observation that World War I had "used up words," explains Hemingway scholar Zoe Trodd, who writes that his style is similar to a "multi-focal" photographic reality. The syntax, which lacks subordinating conjunctions, creates static sentences. The photographic "snapshot" style creates a collage of images. Hemingway omits internal punctuation (colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses) in favor of short declarative sentences, which are meant to build, as events build, to create a sense of the whole. He also uses techniques analogous to cinema, such as cutting quickly from one scene to the next, or splicing one scene into another. Intentional omissions allow the reader to fill the gap as though responding to instructions from the author and create three-dimensional prose.[91] Biographer James Mellow writes that the bullfighting scenes are presented with a crispness and clarity that evoke the sense of a newsreel.[92]

text: Hemingway also uses color and visual art techniques to convey emotional range in his descriptions of the Irati River. In Translating Modernism: Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Ronald Berman compares Hemingway's treatment of landscape with that of the post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. During a 1949 interview, Hemingway told Lillian Ross that he learned from Cézanne how to "make a landscape." In comparing writing to painting he told her, "This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and woods, and the rocks we have to climb over."[93] The landscape is seen subjectively—the viewpoint of the observer is paramount.[94] To Jake, landscape "meant a search for a solid form .... not existentially present in [his] life in Paris."[94]

text: Reception[edit]

text: Hemingway's first novel was arguably his best and most important and came to be seen as an iconic modernist novel, although Reynolds emphasizes that Hemingway was not philosophically a modernist.[95] In the book, his characters epitomized the post-war expatriate generation for future generations.[96] He had received good reviews for his volume of short stories, In Our Time, of which Edmund Wilson wrote, "Hemingway's prose was of the first distinction." Wilson's comments were enough to bring attention to the young writer.[97]

text:
No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. Mr. Hemingway knows how not only to make words be specific but how to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts. It is magnificent writing.

—The New York Times review of The Sun Also Rises, 31 October 1926.[98]

text: Good reviews came in from many major publications. Conrad Aiken wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, "If there is a better dialogue to be written today I do not know where to find it"; and Bruce Barton wrote in The Atlantic that Hemingway "writes as if he had never read anybody's writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself," and that the characters "are amazingly real and alive."[19] Many reviewers, among them H.L. Mencken, praised Hemingway's style, use of understatement, and tight writing.[99]

text: Other critics, however, disliked the novel. The Nation's critic believed Hemingway's hard-boiled style was better suited to the short stories published in In Our Time than his novel. Writing in the New Masses, Hemingway's friend John Dos Passos asked: "What's the matter with American writing these days? .... The few unsad young men of this lost generation will have to look for another way of finding themselves than the one indicated here." Privately he wrote Hemingway an apology for the review.[19] The reviewer for the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote of the novel, "The Sun Also Rises is the kind of book that makes this reviewer at least almost plain angry."[100] Some reviewers disliked the characters, among them the reviewer for The Dial, who thought the characters were shallow and vapid; and The Nation and Atheneum deemed the characters boring and the novel unimportant.[99] The reviewer for The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote of the book that it "begins nowhere and ends in nothing."[1]

text: Hemingway's family hated it. His mother, Grace Hemingway, distressed that she could not face the criticism at her local book study class—where it was said that her son was "prostituting a great ability .... to the lowest uses"—expressed her displeasure in a letter to him:

text: The critics seem to be full of praise for your style and ability to draw word pictures but the decent ones always regret that you should use such great gifts in perpetuating the lives and habits of so degraded a strata of humanity .... It is a doubtful honor to produce one of the filthiest books of the year .... What is the matter? Have you ceased to be interested in nobility, honor and fineness in life? .... Surely you have other words in your vocabulary than "damn" and "bitch"—Every page fills me with a sick loathing.[101]

text: Still, the book sold well, and young women began to emulate Brett while male students at Ivy League universities wanted to become "Hemingway heroes." Scribner's encouraged the publicity and allowed Hemingway to "become a minor American phenomenon"—a celebrity to the point that his divorce from Richardson and marriage to Pfieffer attracted media attention.[102]

text: Reynolds believes The Sun Also Rises could only have been written in 1925: it perfectly captured the period between World War I and the Great Depression, and immortalized a group of characters.[103] In the years since its publication, the novel has been criticized for its anti-Semitism, as expressed in the characterization of Robert Cohn. Reynolds explains that although the publishers complained to Hemingway about his description of bulls, they allowed his use of Jewish epithets, which showed the degree to which anti-Semitism was accepted in the US after World War I. Cohn represented the Jewish establishment and contemporary readers would have understood this from his description. Hemingway clearly makes Cohn unlikeable not only as a character but as a character who is Jewish.[104] Critics of the 1970s and 1980s considered Hemingway to be misogynistic and homophobic; by the 1990s his work, including The Sun Also Rises, began to receive critical reconsideration by female scholars.[105]

text: Legacy and adaptations[edit]

text: Hemingway's work continued to be popular in the latter half of the century and after his suicide in 1961. During the 1970s, The Sun Also Rises appealed to what Beegel calls the lost generation of the Vietnam era.[106] Aldridge writes that The Sun Also Rises has kept its appeal because the novel is about being young. The characters live in the most beautiful city in the world, spend their days traveling, fishing, drinking, making love, and generally reveling in their youth. He believes the expatriate writers of the 1920s appeal for this reason, but that Hemingway was the most successful in capturing the time and the place in The Sun Also Rises.[107]

text: Bloom says that some of the characters have not stood the test of time, writing that modern readers are uncomfortable with the anti-semitic treatment of Cohn's character and the romanticization of a bullfighter. Moreover, Brett and Mike belong uniquely to the Jazz Age and do not translate to the modern era. Bloom believes the novel is in the canon of American literature for its formal qualities: its prose and style.[108]

text: The novel made Hemingway famous, inspired young women across America to wear short hair and sweater sets like the heroine's—and to act like her too—and changed writing style in ways that could be seen in any American magazine published in the next twenty years. In many ways, the novel's stripped-down prose became a model for 20th-century American writing. Nagel writes that "The Sun Also Rises was a dramatic literary event and its effects have not diminished over the years."[109]

text: The success of The Sun Also Rises guaranteed interest from Broadway and Hollywood. In 1927 two Broadway producers wanted to adapt the story for the stage but made no immediate offers. Hemingway considered marketing the story directly to Hollywood, telling his editor Max Perkins that he would not sell it for less than $30,000—money he wanted his estranged wife Hadley Richardson to have. Conrad Aiken thought the book was perfect for a film adaptation solely on the strength of dialogue. Hemingway would not see a stage or film adaption anytime soon:[110] he sold the film rights to RKO Pictures in 1932,[111] but only in 1956 was the novel adapted to a film of the same name. Peter Viertel wrote the screenplay. Tyrone Power as Jake played the lead role opposite Ava Gardner as Brett and Errol Flynn as Mike. The royalties went to Richardson.[112] It was again adapted into a film in 1984. It was adapted into a one-act opera in 2000.

text: Hemingway wrote more books about bullfighting: Death in the Afternoon was published in 1932 and The Dangerous Summer was published posthumously in 1985. His depictions of Pamplona, beginning with The Sun Also Rises, helped to popularize the annual running of the bulls at the Festival of St. Fermin.[113]