During such moments of despair, it is unlikely that Hemingway realized that he was actually one of the luckier writers in modern history. Circumstances often seemed to conspire in his favor. All of the right things made their way to him at the right moment: motivated mentors, publisher patrons, wealthy wives—and a trove of material just when he needed it most, in the form of some delectably bad behavior among his peers, which he promptly translated into his groundbreaking debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926. In the book’s pages, those co-opted antics—benders, hangovers, affairs, betrayals—took on a new and loftier guise of their own: experimental literature. Thus elevated, all of this bad behavior rocked the literary world and came to define Hemingway’s entire generation.

In the book’s pages, those co-opted antics—benders, hangovers, affairs, betrayals—took on a new and loftier guise of their own: experimental literature. Thus elevated, all of this bad behavior rocked the literary world and came to define Hemingway’s entire generation.

Everyone knows how this story ends: to say that Hemingway eventually became famous and successful is a gross understatement. A Nobel laureate, he has been widely called the father of modern literature and for decades has been read in dozens of languages around the globe. More than half a century after his death, he still commands headlines and crops up in gossip columns.

What follows is the story of how Hemingway became Hemingway in the first place—and the book that set it all in motion. The backstory of The Sun Also Rises and that of its author’s rise are one and the same. Critics have long cited Hemingway’s second novel, A Farewell to Arms, as the one that established him as a giant in the literary pantheon, but in many ways, the significance of The Sun Also Rises is much greater. As far as literature was concerned, it essentially introduced its mainstream readers to the 20th century.

“The Sun Also Rises did more than break the ice,” says Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review. “It was modern literature fully arrived for a grand public. I’m not sure that there was ever another moment when one novelist was so obviously the leader of a whole generation. You read one sentence and it doesn’t sound like anything that came before.”

Not that there weren’t other tremors before this earthquake. A small movement of writers had been trying to shove literature out of musty Edwardian corridors and into the fresh air of the modern world. It was a question of who would break through first—and who could make new ways of writing appealing to the mainstream reader, who, for the most part, still seemed to be perfectly satisfied with the more florid, verbose approaches of Henry James and Edith Wharton. James Joyce’s radical novel Ulysses, for example, had blown the minds of many postwar writers.