Learn Something New Every Day

Sorting through the donated books, we came across a British paperback, Fiesta : The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Huh? we said. What is this? None of the biographies of Hemingway on the shelf at the moment were any help.

One of the reference librarians found us a fascinating (well, fascinating if this is what you're thinking about) article, The Textual History of The Sun Also Rises, which offers the following explanation: "The eventual title given the novel, The Sun Also Rises, was not chosen until the typescript. Hemingway had a list of possible titles in the last of the notebooks used for the first draft. He chose the published title because he wanted to 'emphasize the optimistic idea of progress of life's cycle' (Svoboda 106). It should be noted that although Hemingway changed the original title of Fiesta to the one known, British editions of the novel have used the title of Fiesta from its original publication to the present." The Svoboda book cited is Frederic Joseph Svoboda, Hemingway & The Sun Also Rises, The Crafting of a Style (UP of Kansas, 1983.) We don't have it in the system. But Interlibrary Loan could get it for you if you want to pursue this further :-)

The Sun Also Rises; all of Hemingway's works.