Travel | Literature | Hemingway

One Hundred Years of Hemingway

Written in 1925, The Sun Also Rises struck like lightning, turning Pamplona, Spain, into a global tourism juggernaut.

Patrons enjoy late-afternoon meals and drinks at La Closerie des Lilas, while bartender Zoubert Maanmoune creates another libation with his usual panache. (Photo: ©Craig K. Collins)

“I sat in a corner (of La Closerie des Lilas) with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème and I drank half of it when it cooled and left it on the table while I wrote …. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it …. There were days ahead to be (writing) each day. No other thing mattered.”
— A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

I am sitting amid the Art Deco splendor of La Closerie des Lilas on Boulevard du Montparnasse in the 6th Arrondissement of Paris and attempting to order a Jack Rose, one of the many exotic libations mentioned in Ernest Hemingway’s breakout first novel The Sun Also Rises, much of which he penned at a nearby table here in the late summer and early fall of 1925.

“Jacques Rose?” the waitress asks in a thick French accent, puzzled. “I don’t know this drink, but maybe our bartender. I will see.”

Minutes later she slides a remarkably elegant cocktail onto the table.