The Sun Also Rises

Just completed Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises." What a masterpiece. Nearly eighty years later, generations and ages apart, the book's message personally resonated with me, and were my friends to read it, they to. Thing is, they're a bit to close to the minds' of these characters, so it's my guess they won't find that resonation, save someone were to lead them directly to it.

Before this, "Old Man and the Sea" had been the only novel I had read of his.

I can see why this book took on biblesque status among college-aged students in the late 1920s. This is pure bohemia, manifest with every new adventure these drunken protagonists encounter.

The lead figures of the book, it is my understanding, are based on real American writers of the '20s. Character Robert Cohn represented writer Harold Lobe, and portrayed an ill-mannered and ill-sober bore of a jew. As one of the characters might have put it, he was always "tight." Harold Lobe published a rebuttal to the characterization years later in a book "The Way it Was" (1959).