At the beginning of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first novel, he quotes Gertrude Stein as saying “You are all a lost generation.” He and his peers were soon known as “The Lost Generation,” a nickname still used for these post World War I artists and writers and their modern style.

With the book's publication in 1926, the American expatriate community in Paris tried to identify the originals of the characters. Jake Barnes seemed to bear a close resemblance in some ways to Robert McAlmon and in others to William Bird; Lady Brett Ashley was considered a portrait of Lady Duff Twysden; Robert Cohn a version of Harold Loeb; Mike Campbell a version of Patrick Guthrie; and Bill Gorton patterned after Hemingway's pal Donald Ogden Stewart.

Lady Duff Twysden, an Englishwoman born Mary Smurthwaite, was an aristocrat by marriage to her second husband. Known as a hard drinker, Twysden was popular with the mainly male ex-pat crowd. She embodied the new liberated woman of the 1920s and photos of her at the time show a tall, thin boyish-looking woman with short hair. She was also fond of referring to herself as a “chap."

Lady Brett dominates the novel, even when she's not present.  Jake drinks a lot but Brett drinks more. Brett goes from relationship to relationship. And Brett makes a connection between the major male characters in the novel — Barnes, Cohn, and Romero.

Many people were angered by some of the portrayals. However, the novel won rave reviews. The New York Times said its “hard athletic narrative prose puts more literary English to shame."