Hemingway and His Conspirators

Ernest Hemingway was the scion of a century of hyperbole and mass media. While previous public figures like Dickens and Twain reached an audience of thousands, Hemingway, thanks to the popular press and the movies, reached an audience of millions. Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture shows readers how, aside from talent, the author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms became the premier public author of the twentieth century. Paying close attention to the nature of the marketplace from 1923 to 1933, Hemingway focuses on Ernest Hemingway as a young professional writer in a newly emerging commercial context. The author, born in 1899, famous by 1933, was drawn to public display, of course, but Hemingway goes beyond other books to show how he and his work were packaged, marketed, and sold in the early years of his career. Hemingway shows how and why Hemingway moved from Boni & Liveright to Scribners even though the former was in certain ways the better publishing house for him. It shows what Scribners and its influential editor Max Perkins did well for Hemingway, and what they may have done less well.Perhaps most important, it shows how the movie version of A Farewell to Arms, adapted from his novel, catapulted Hemingway and his career. Ignored by his biographers, the reams of studio publicity associated with Paramount Pictures' A Farewell to Arms (1932) countered his sagging literary reputation in the early 1930s and gave the world the Hemingway persona that would so intrigue the public and so undermine the author's talent. Based on revealing letters and other documents from archives, Hemingway has the rigor of a scholarly study and the dramatis personae of a Hollywood production_not only Hemingway and Perkins but Scott Fitzgerald, Helen Hayes, Sinclair Lewis, David O. Selznick, and Gary Cooper. Set in an endlessly fascinating age, the 1920s, it tells a backstage story of the tangle of literature, publishing, and motion pictures in the formative years of a time when the possibilities of a new mass audience challenged and changed art and literature forever.