In the middle of June 1925, Ernest Hemingway sat down to write. He pulled out a stenographer’s notebook, otherwise used for list-making. The back contained a rundown of letters he “must write”; intended recipients included Ezra Pound—a mentor of his—and his Aunt Grace. Also scribbled there: a list of stories the 25-year-old writer, who had moved to Paris in 1921, had recently submitted to various publications. On this day, he opened the notebook to a fresh page and scrawled in pencil across the top:

Along with Youth

A Novel

He began writing a sea adventure, set on a troop transport ship in 1918 and featuring a character named Nick Adams. Exactly two months earlier, Hemingway had informed Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, the prestigious publishing house in New York City, that he considered the novel to be an artificial and played-out genre. (Perkins had heard through the grapevine that Hemingway was doing some remarkable writing.) Yet here he was, making a bid to jump-start one.

It was not his first attempt. Hemingway’s literary ambition at this time was seemingly limitless—yet he was still a frustrated nobody as far as the wider public was concerned. He had long been trying to sell his experimental stories to publishers back in the States, with no success. F. Scott Fitzgerald—then the celebrated oracle of the Jazz Age and the friend who had been championing Hemingway to Perkins at Scribner’s—published practically everywhere, but no commercial publication or publisher would touch Hemingway. So far, he’d managed to place stories with small literary magazines; his first book, Three Stories & Ten Poems, was published in 1923 in a run of merely 300 copies. When Hemingway’s second book, In Our Time, appeared in 1924, only 170 copies were available for sale.

“I knew I would have to write a novel,” he later recalled. After all, this is what Fitzgerald had done. Before Fitzgerald had published his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920, he too had been a regular in the slush pile. After Perkins brought out This Side of Paradise with Scribner’s, Fitzgerald remembered later, “editors and publishers were open to me, impresarios begged plays, the movies panted for screen material.” This was precisely the sort of success that Hemingway craved, and a blockbuster novel was key.

Already there had been two false starts. When Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, had moved to Paris, four years earlier, he had taken along with him the pages of a starter novel—which Hadley lost in a careless accident, along with most of his other “Juvenilia,” as he described the writings to Ezra Pound. He then hatched and abandoned an idea for another novel, satirizing a dictatorial colleague at the Toronto Star, where Hemingway had worked as a deadline reporter.

Along with Youth was destined to peter out after 27 pages. Hemingway decided that he would simply have to “let the pressure build”: when the moment came, his debut novel would simply happen. “When I had to write it,” he later recalled, “then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice.”

Little did he know that, at that moment, in June 1925, all of the elements were falling into place at last; he was just one fateful event away from getting the material he so desperately needed to join the novel club. With the resulting book—which would come to be called The Sun Also Rises, published 90 years ago this year—Hemingway would capture several coveted prizes: he would essentially broker for mainstream audiences a new era of modern writing, find himself dubbed the voice of a “Lost Generation,” and become launched as an international sensation.