Hemingway Review Blog

            Social histories of the twenties often account for opinions by referring to the response of groups to headline events. Many of these histories use familiar rubrics: the boom, the consumerism it induced, the moral and stylistic changes affecting different generations.  The "Introduction to the Volume" of  The Introduction concludes that Hemingway's letters and fiction are reliable evidence for the cost, nature, and value of things he observed. 

Michael Reynolds wrote in The Young Hemingway (1986) that “not long after the movie of Roosevelt's African hunt played Oak Park, the Hemingway family-reunion picture shows young Ernest in his safari costume standing at the edge of the smilers. At his side he holds a hat like the one Teddy wore.  In National Geographic, he devoured Roosevelt's account of the hunt, complete with pictures of dead animals and half-naked native women.  Roosevelt's book African Game Trails became a permanent part of Hemingway's library.”

Thomas Bevilacqua brings his series to a close with toasts and trivia!

Our Man in Oak Park reboots mid-conference.

Tom talks about our evening with Tim O'Brien.

Celebrating Susan Beegel's editorship and the PEN Hemingway on board the Odyssey.

Our Man in Oak Park describes Monday sessions.

Thomas Bevilacqua, our man in Oak Park, summarizes the start of the festivities.

The Hemingway Review blog welcomes Thomas Bevilacqua as "Our Man in Oak Park."  Tom will be offering a daily account of the Oak Park conference--stories, highlights, gossip (just kidding), and photos.  

Mariel Hemingway is the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson, and daughter of Jack Hemingway, Ernest’s oldest son.  On behalf of the Hemingway Review and the Newsletter, Wayne Catan conducted an interview with Mariel in which she discusses her acting career, her work with Woody Allen, the famous actor’s depiction of her grandfather in Midnight in Paris, the first Hemingway book she read (and wrote about), her work with suicide prevention, her newest book Out Came the Sun, and much more. Contributor Wayne Catan conducts the interview.  

Ron Berman writes about "Books in the Background" of Hemingway scholarship in this new series of posts for the Hemingway Review blog.  He will tackle all kinds of books that contribute to richer understanding of the context in which Hemingway lived and wrote.  In this installment, he looks at books related to Prohibition.

The Hemingway legacy is long and wide, and the myths and fantasies that have grown around him are endless and often irrepressible.  The bull-fighting warrior lover. The heroic soldier. The six-toed cats. Sometimes you don’t even know where to begin when the subject turns to some debatable piece of Hemingway lore.

The Spring 2016 issue celebrates the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Hemingway Review.  We acknowledge this milestone with a special “anniversary features” section, which includes an interview with the founding editor of the Review, Charles M. “Tod” Oliver, and a creative piece by Kirk Curnutt that imagines how Hemingway felt on his thirty-fifth birthday through a series of imaginary letters to friends and family.  Hemingway, for the first time since I am  editor , graces the cover.  In the image, he is, of course, thirty-five and looks out at us confidently from the deck of his recently acquired boat, Pilar.

Ron Berman writes about "Books in the Background" of Hemingway scholarship in this new series of posts for the Hemingway Review blog.  He will tackle all kinds of books that contribute to richer understanding of the context in which Hemingway lived and wrote.  In this installment, he looks at books related to photography.

Ron Berman writes about "Books in the Background" of Hemingway scholarship in this new series of posts for the Hemingway Review blog.  He will tackle all kinds of books that contribute to richer understanding of the context in which Hemingway lived and wrote.  In this installment, he looks at books related to The Great War.

Ron Berman writes about "Books in the Background" of Hemingway scholarship in this new series of posts for the Hemingway Review blog.  He will tackle all kinds of books that contribute to richer understanding of the context in which Hemingway lived and wrote.  

The Fall 2016 issue begins with a remarkable front cover, which features an untitled watercolor by Hemingway’s friend, the writer and painter John Dos Passos. As the note in the issue by Donald Pizer argues, the painting presents a macho Hemingway rushing to aid an injured Donald Ogden Stewart at an amateur bullfight-related spectacle during the 1924 Pamplona fiesta.  I am very pleased that Don, a scholar renowned for his work on Dos Passos and Hemingway, chose the Review to showcase this incredible find!  A larger color version of this painting will be posted on this blog.  Check back soon.

The Fall 2015 cover features an untitled watercolor by Hemingway's friend, the writer and painter John Dos Passos.  Members can see the image here in color!

As Don Pizer argues in his note, the painting presents a macho Hemingway rushing to aid an injured Donald Ogden Stewart at an amateur bullfight during the 1924 Pamplona fiesta.

Greg Forter’s insightful chapter on The Sun Also Rises, in his book Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism, employs René Girard’s conception of sacrificial violence to suggest that bullfighting in the novel becomes “Hemingway’s fantasmatic … way of imagining a society that knows how to displace, ritualize, and thereby regulate its own violence, rather than wreaking it devastatingly on the bodies of its members” (80). As Spain sat out the World War, one might reasonably see the bullfight as prophylactic—until Spanish society’s internal violence erupted with a vengeance in the civil war of the 1930s.