PRI (Personal Reading Inventory): The Sun Also Rises
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1. Historical: Hemingway based his book The Sun Also Rises on the time period of the Lost Generation, a wandering "lost" time period after WWI. While Hemingway explores the superficiality of his characters' indulgent lifestyles, he touches upon a number of themes, many of which have to do with new notions of masculinity arising after the war. Jake's purported impotence is a powerful symbol for the emasculated postwar male psyche, and bull-fighting describes sex as warfare on a metaphorical level. In addition, Hemingway conceived of the idea for The Sun Also Rises while attending the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, with friends in July, 1925. The novel is a roman à clef where the characters are based on real people and the action is based on real events.
2. Biographical: Ernest Hemingway, born in 1899, was an American author and journalist. His distinctive writing style, characterized by economy and understatement, heavily influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and public image. He produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. In 1925, Hemingway took a trip to the famous Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain that would later provided the basis of Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises. The novel is widely considered Hemingway's greatest work, artfully examining the postwar disillusionment of his generation.

3. Literary/Philosophical Time Period: The Sun Also Rises was written based on the Lost Generation. This term refers to the wandering, purposeless time period where society as a whole lacked masculinity after WWI. It is typically a time that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living disillusioned war veterans.