Redeeming the Serpentine Subtext: Dennis Covington's Appropriation of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in Salvation on Sand Mountain

Dennis Covington's award-winning Salvation on Sand Mountain, a nonfiction book from the 1990s, seems modeled in part on Hemingway's 1920s novel, The Sun Also Rises. The novel is a roman à clef and the 1990s work an intricately plotted piece of literary nonfiction. The novel's protagonist, Jake Barnes, is a young journalist trying to make sense of his own spiritual experience—while the nonfiction is participatory journalism written by another young journalist trying to make sense of his spiritual experience. This essay explores these and other parallels between the two works to discover how Salvation on Sand Mountain can be read as a postmodern response to The Sun Also Rises.