In Ernest Hemingway’s breakout 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, reviewers during Prohibition-Era America commented on how much these Lost Generation characters drank. They consumed wine, cocktails, and beer - all the damn time, every single day - out in the Left Bank or in their homes, on trains and buses, and in their hotels.
How did drinking signify in Hemingway’s depiction of expatriate writers, artists, and Great War veterans grappling with a sense of the world being fundamentally shattered by the War and the broader Crisis of the Modern? In this edition of Brewseum Book Club, Bill Savage, Northwestern University professor and Brewseum Advisory Board Member, discusses the symbolic weight of Hemingway’s depiction of cafés in Paris, wine shops in Pamplona, and the different meaning of drinking culture for urban sophisticates of Paris and Basque farmers of the Pyrenees.