The Sun Also Rises

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Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly's star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn's distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met anyone of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly. Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had become of him.

Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was a Nobel Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer. He was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, an affluent suburb of Chicago. The family summered in Northern Michigan, where he developed his life-long passion for hunting, fishing and the outdoors. He started his career as a writer for the Kansas City Star, but left for Italy after six months to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I.  After being wounded by a mortar, he received the Silver Medal of Valor from the Italian Government and returned to the U.S., though he didn t stay long; he returned to Europe as an international reporter for Canadian and American newspapers, though his real ambition was to write fiction. He became part of an influential group of expatriate Americans and modernist writers living in Paris, including Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. His various experiences abroad particularly his first Spanish bullfight and the festivals in Pamplona informed his writing of The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926. Among his other notable works are A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952).

Maria Hinojosa s journalist credits include reporting for PBS, CBS, WGBH, WNBC, CNN, NPR, and anchoring and executive producing the Peabody Award winning show Latino USA. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC and has won several awards, including four Emmys and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 2010, she founded Futuro Media, an independent nonprofit organization with the mission of producing multimedia content from a POC perspective. She is also the founding co-anchor of the political podcast In The Thick. She has written three books, including Once I Was You.

Praise for The Sun Also Rises

A truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. . .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. --The New York Times