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Hemingway was apparently inspired to write the novel after reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's manuscript of The Great Gatsby, which Fitzgerald brought to Paris in 1925. Prior to this, Hemingway, who only wrotes short stories and poems, had frequently declared that the novel was an obsolete form which did not interest him.

The novel is a powerful expose of the life and values of the Lost Generation, including characters Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley , wounded by the horrors of World War I. Barnes had his penis shot off in World War I (some commentators mistakenly think it was his testicles that were lost), and thus cannot have sexual relations with Brett. The possibilities of oral sex or other forms of sexual contact are not explored.

The novel was a roman a clef, with most of the characters based on Hemingway and a gaggle of pals who accompanied him to Spain in 1925. The character of Eddie Cohen is a savage portrait of novelist Harold Loeb , who had aroused the anger of Hemingway by indulging in an amorous sojourn with Lady Duff Twysden in Normandy before bringing her to Spain. Twysed was turned into the character Brett Ashley. Hemingway based the character of Barnes on himself.

The novel has a heavy undercurrent of suppressed emotions and buried values pulsing beneath the surface. It depicts through the shell-shocked and aimless expatriates, the story of humanity losing the broad optimism in itself as a consequence of the war, and instead taking refuge in the narrow dungeons of everyday survival, to find a purpose for existence. Nevertheless, there is an almost jarring silence on the war itself, which is rarely spoken about by the characters, but whose scars are evident with every scene.

Also, Hemingway was fluent in three romance languages: French, Spanish, and Italian. Each of these has a much smaller vocabulary than English, and yet each manages to be richly expressive. Talking about Brett and Mike’s speech, Jake Barnes tells us that "The English spoken language—the upper classes, anyway—must have fewer words than the Eskimo. . . . The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything. . . . I liked the way they talked." Hemingway may have been inspired by the ways in which these European cultures, all of which he admired, managed to communicate effectively, even poetically, using so few words.

The book's title is taken from Ecclesiastes.