“A Good Place to Buy In”: Dollar Privilege and Expatriate Mobility in The Sun Also Rises

This essay rereads Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises through the economic conditions of expatriate mobility after the First World War. Against interpretations that treat the novel’s lostness chiefly as a psychological, sexual, or stylistic condition, it argues that lostness in Hemingway is also materially financed. Behind the apparent drift of Hemingway’s expatriates lies an early expatriate economy shaped by dollar strength, European currency instability, tourism infrastructure, credit, debt, and uneven purchasing power. Monetary details that often appear incidental become a symbolic grammar of mobility. Through them, Hemingway registers an emergent form of American economic power before the fully institutionalized hegemony of the post-1945 order. Europe, in this reading, is not merely a backdrop for postwar disillusionment, but a purchasable field of movement, pleasure, and temporary escape. The “lost generation” therefore appears less economically universal than the phrase suggests.