Most writers' first novels do not turn out to be their most important work. In Ernest Hemingway's case. The Sun Also Rises has gradually come to have just that reputation. After an intense four-year writing apprenticeship (to Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and others), Hemingway wrote his 1926 novel with a sense of surety, a knowledge of craft, and a belief that literature could create morality. He produced a document of the chaotic postwar 1920s and a testament to the writer's ability to create characters, mood, situation, and happenings that were as real as life.

Readers reacted to the novel explosively. “Here is a book which, like its characters, begins nowhere and ends in nothing”; “a most unpleasant book”; “raw satire”; “entirely out of focus.” Whether critics saw Hemingway's style as the flaw or, more commonly, his characters and their rootless, sensual ways, they were ready to condemn his choices of both method and subject. As the reviewer of the Chicago Daily Tribune exclaimed, “The Sun Also Rises is the kind of book that makes this reviewer at least almost plain angry.” The Dial reviewer called Hemingway's characters “vapid,” as shallow “as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotion.” Even Hemingway's mother agreed that his characters were “utterly degraded people” and that the novel might better have never been written. Edwin Muir, writing in Nation & Athenaeum, stated that the novel was skillfully written but lacked “artistic significance. We see the lives of a group of people laid bare, and we feel that it does not matter to us.”