Each way, in the short-term, he was wounded by the shame of rejection and cowardice. Either he was rejected for poor eyesight or he failed to enlist and instead joined up as an ambulance driver. The key to Hemingway, the thing that unlocks the most important doors to his creative life, was a deeper, more personal darkness, his complicated experience of the first world war. In addition, The Sun Also Rises, like most novels of the 1920s, is a response to the author’s recent wartime service. At the same time, the escape into the wild is a great American theme that recurs in the works of Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain (Nos 16, 17 and 23 in this series). For some critics, the heart of the novel is the bullfight, and how each character responds to the experience of the corrida. The novel, a roman à clef describing an anguished love affair between the expatriate American war veteran Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, a femme fatale representative in the writer’s mind of 1920s womanhood, is mostly located in Spain, Hemingway’s favourite country. It was also the setting for the first section of Hemingway’s first, and best, novel (published in the UK as Fiesta). It’s a cameo grounded in the truth that, for one of America’s 20th-century greats, Paris in the 20s was a source of artistic liberation. I n Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Corey Stoll makes a scene-stealing appearance as the young Ernest Hemingway, tough-guy modernist and friend of Gertrude Stein.
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