This chapter follows Hemingway from his journalistic work in the early 1920s through the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926. Ambitious to write fiction that would be innovative and popular, Hemingway absorbed the influences of Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others as he adapted news stories into sketches and wrote short stories based on combat experience and on his youth. Hemingway’s early style grew in the rich soil of literary experimentation in Paris in the 1920s, where he encountered an international literary and artistic avant-garde. This earliest work exemplifies Hemingway’s experimentation and its relationship to his deep need to express the apparently inexpressible contents of his psyche and experience. The reception of his 1925 story collection In Our Time established his early reputation. This chapter’s reading of The Sun Also Rises emphasizes Hemingway’s ironic deployment of both received narrative conventions and religiously significant pilgrimage and ritual themes, which locates Hemingway in a crucial vein of literary modernism exemplified by Eliot’s The Waste Land. Like these other modernist works, Hemingway’s novel is immured in the social attitudes within which he worked; anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia tangle the novel’s surface texture but also shape its narrative structures.

Textual studies scholar Robert Trogdon, currently editing the Library of America edition of Hemingway’s 1922–1926 stories and novels, argues that textual criticism of Hemingway has largely been stunted for two decades. The main culprit has been the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which in 1998 added twenty years to the traditional limits of copyright to ninety-five years. As a result, major novels such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are only now approaching public domain. Trogdon argues that in the meantime a surprising amount of textual corruptions have been allowed to pass from edition to edition through Hemingway’s publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and through the Hemingway estate. Detailing several rather striking typos, printer-induced errors, and even dropped lines of dialogue, Trogdon makes the case for a scholarly edition that would not only correct this errata but also restore Hemingway’s original intentions at moments he was restricted by obscenity and libel concerns to alter his manuscripts and typescripts. One such famous moment was Scribner’s refusal to print the word “cocksucker” in A Farewell to Arms; another was Maxwell Perkins’s insistence that he change an attack on F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” to a fictional name.