The original cover of 'The Sun Also Rises' (L) and Ernest Hemingway in 1951 (R). Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

“Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?” 

Robert Cohn asks this question of narrator Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. “What the hell, Robert,” Jake replies, “What the hell.”

I gave the novel a re-read this past weekend because it celebrates its centenary later this week—like many (most?) Americans, I had originally read it as a high school assignment—and realized something startling. Hemingway’s death in 1961 actually was 35 years after Robert Cohn’s observation in the 1926 novel.

His literary reputation had declined somewhat significantly along with his health by the time of his death by suicide in 1961, but not before “Papa” had added to his legend with other classics like A Farewell to Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls and his late-career Nobel Prize-winning novella The Old Man and the Sea. In 1926, he had already established himself as a short story writer of note with Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923) and In Our Time (1925), and more short stories would follow alongside other novels, but it was The Sun Also Rises that made Hemingway a star.

“No amount of analysis can convey the quality of ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame,” wrote The New York Times in an anonymous review just three days after its release (with quite the headline: “Marital Tragedy”).

“Mr. Hemingway knows how not only to make words be specific but how to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts,” wrote the reviewer, who noted that fans of the young writer’s short stories had eagerly anticipated such a novel. “It is magnificent writing, filled with that organic action which gives a compelling picture of character. This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature.”

That opinion was not universal but was still a common one: Hemingway had captured the mood and tone of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s, especially the many wounded and battle-weary veterans of World War I, with his tale of wayward expatriates wandering across France and Spain. Three years later, his novel about that war, A Farewell to Arms, was an even greater critical and commercial success. Both books showed off Hemingway’s minimalist style and his “iceberg theory” of writing, where the language of the novel on the page shows only a small fraction of the invisible emotions and subplots beneath.

America did not review The Sun Also Rises, and three years later referred to A Farewell to Arms as “garbage,” though evaluations in later years were kinder to both. In 1926, the magazine criticized Hemingway’s satire of Sherwood Anderson, The Torrents of Spring, noting its appeal would be limited to “the few who are interested in our modern literary schools.” Hemingway, the unsigned review noted, “expresses his clever, if not always accurate judgments of contemporary writers and professes a very lax philosophy of matrimony.” 

Such reviews were not out of place in much of America’s coverage of contemporary literature in the first half of the 20th century; the magazine was often critical of contemporary literature (particularly fiction) and of what its editors saw as a society-wide decline in religiosity and morality. Along with emerging young American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos (though Willa Cather received positive coverage for Death Comes for the Archbishop), Hemingway was seen as a representative of an atheist and nihilist worldview. And over the years, his reputation as a hard-drinking, hard-living outlaw (and, dare I suggest, his support for the Republican side during and after the Spanish Civil War) didn’t help change the impression he was no altar boy. 

Indeed he was not. But what was he? Hemingway, raised Protestant, had officially become Catholic in 1927 when he married his second wife, though scholars usually place the beginning of his often-subterranean relationship with Catholicism at his reception of extreme unction from a Catholic priest after being wounded in 1918 while working as an ambulance driver in World War I. In her 2024 book Hemingway’s Faith (reviewed in America by Ron Hansen), Mary Claire Kendall recalls a description of Hemingway from the 1920s by a friend who called him “a very strong Catholic. His religion came mainly from the apparitions of the Virgin Mary. He told me several times that if there were no Bible, no man-made Church laws, the apparitions proved beyond any doubt that the Catholic Church was the true church.”

Further, Kendall wrote, The Sun Also Rises is “drenched in Catholicism.” In one scene, the wounded Jake Barnes describes his visit to a cathedral in Pamplona: “I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying. I was a little ashamed, and regretted I was such a rotten Catholic,” that “it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time.”

Hemingway was more circumspect in his own public commentary over the years; as Hansen notes in his review, the author’s most prominent public mention of the topic was thus: “Politics and religion are two things I never discuss. If my books don’t make it clear how I feel about both, then I’ve failed in my life’s work.”

In recent years, authors including the aforementioned Hansen, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and Augustine Himmel have offered varying contemporary takes on how Hemingway is received by the modern believer. Himmel, for example, pointed out in a 2017 essay for America that even as late as The Old Man And The Sea, Hemingway’s faith “permeates much of his fiction. Santiago, after all, means St. James, and in 1954 Hemingway formally presented his Nobel Prize Medal to Our Lady of Charity, the Patroness of Cuba.”

On the other hand, it is worth noting that most of Hemingway’s biographers over the years have not treated his religious faith or identity as particularly important to a writer for whom living a life of meaning was otherwise a central concern. Maybe, after all, Hemingway just didn’t care.

What to make of Hemingway’s own personal life—not the fictional characters but the flesh-and-bone man? O’Donnell, a longtime contributor to America, reviewed “Hemingway,” a documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick in the PBS “American Masters” series, in 2021. The show, she wrote, portrayed a terrible person who was also a great writer. For viewers, it “raises the provocative question, Is it possible to admire the art produced by a writer whom the reader dislikes, disdains, perhaps even despises?”

Ultimately, she concedes the following:

Ernest Hemingway may have been a terrible person, but perhaps it was his identity as a sinner that made it possible for him to understand the sinners all around him, to write about them with deep interest, commitment and compassion. Who knows? Perhaps if he were a better man, he’d have been a lesser writer.

“We are forced,” O’Donnell added, “to face the troubling fact that the gods of art often use the least worthy among us to be their vessels.”

Here’s a little bit of fun, too: In 1958, the writer Joel Wells penned a series of parodies for America imagining how Catholic writers like Francois Mauriac, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and, yes, Ernest Hemingway might narrate the death of a dog that had been reported in the local paper. The Hemingway parody is a masterpiece, beginning thus: “He was an old dog, and he had not chased a car for four years. But he would chase a car tonight and the boy would see him and know that he was not afraid.”

Its final line? “For four years he sat in the afternoon dust under the porch and listened to the applause of brakes on the highway. Tonight they would squeal for him.”

As Jake Barnes said a century ago: Isn’t it pretty to think so?

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is our “The World Gives My Mother Back to Me,” by Mia Schilling Grogan. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.