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Hemingway’s lifestyle appears aspirational to many, but like some present-day influencers, there was more to him than met the public eye. There was a dark side to the hypermasculinity so central to his brand. He battled with insecurity, jealousy, and alcoholism, and had fistfights and affairs.

As a result of his lifestyle, Hemingway sustained significant injuries including nine concussions, and the depression, health problems, and mental decline these injuries caused ultimately led to his suicide in his Idaho home. [Ibid.]

After Hemingway’s death, his widow Mary kept the house, preserving it and the objects of her and Hemingway’s life together. After Mary’s death in 1986, she willed the house to continue to be preserved, and the house went to the Nature Conservancy. In 2017, ownership was transferred to The Community Library, and the commitment to maintaining the house as a time capsule of the Hemingways’ life and legacy remains.[6] Through these objects and what they represent, Hemingway and his place in literary and public imagination lives on.

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Sources

[6] https://www.idahostatesman.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article151428487.html

Some of Hemingway’s most widely read accounts of his life are those about his international adventures. He lived in Paris and Cuba, wrote often about his time watching bullfights in Spain, and made hunting trips to Africa. He wrote Death in the Afternoon, a book about Spanish bullfighting, in 1932. In 1935, he wrote Green Hills of Africa, the story of a monthlong safari he took. These travels added to Hemingway’s image as a glamorous celebrity figure.

Hemingway’s house in Ketchum, Idaho is full of souvenirs of his travels, showing that he treasured his time abroad as much as the public treasured reading about it.

How Hemingway’s World Traveler Lives on Today

• The Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, includes the “running of the bulls.” Although the festival has been conducted for centuries, Hemingway popularized it in his novel The Sun Also Rises. Today, Pamplona hosts one million participants each year and #runningofthebulls has nearly 50,000 posts on Instagram.
• The Hemingway Trails and Quiz app has interactive, clue-driven treasure hunt style trails in Key West, Cuba, London, Paris, Juan les Pins, Cap d’Antibes, Arles, Madrid, Pamplona, Ronda, and Valencia so you can follow in Hemingway’s footsteps and learn about his life and work.

Part of Hemingway’s image was that of the rugged outdoorsman. He was known to enjoy deep-sea fishing and hunting, and he went on multiple safaris in Africa. His favorite outdoor brand was Abercrombie & Fitch.

Hemingway moved to Idaho in 1959 with his fourth wife, Mary, after spending much time here over the years. He enjoyed the outdoors and the locals and made some of his closest friends there. He developed a deep appreciation for the nature of the place, which he describes in a eulogy for one of his friends:

“He loved the warm sun of summer and the high mountain meadows,
the trails through the timber and the sudden clear blue of the lakes.
He loved the hills in the winter when the snow comes.
Best of all he loved the fall … the fall with the tawny and grey,
the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams
and above the hills the high blue windless skies.
He loved to shoot, he loved to ride and he loved to fish.” [4]

The above passage is inscribed on a bust of him not far from where he is buried in Ketchum, Idaho.

How Hemingway’s Outdoorsman Influence Lives on Today

• The 2012 movie “Hemingway and Gellhorn” opens with a ferocious battle between the Hemingway character and a large fish on the open sea. The Hemingway character also fishes in the 2016 movie “Genius” and many movies depict Hemingway as a sportsman.
• “Hemingway worked hard and played hard. He was an outdoorsman who appreciated the benefits of a good night’s sleep” with the Hemingway mattress.
• In Hemingway in Comics, Robert K. Elder’s “research into Hemingway’s comic presence demonstrates the truly international reach of Hemingway as a pop culture icon.” In more than 120 appearances across multiple languages, Hemingway is “often portrayed as a hypermasculine legend.”

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Sources

[4] https://www.ernesthemingwaycollection.com/about-hemingway/ernest-hemingway-in-idaho

Hemingway’s brand had a big impact on the literary world and what it means to be an American author. Before Hemingway, the popular idea of the American writer was someone private and intellectual, confined to both a writing desk and the literary sphere.

There were exceptions to this image that came before Hemingway, such as Mark Twain, but none of them achieved the level of celebrity for their personal lives that Hemingway did. Hemingway’s public persona not only changed this conception, it nearly replaced it, fueling new stereotypes and influencing the actions of writers after him [Ibid.].

His work, too, was impactful. His unique deceptively simple literary style honed during his time as a news writer is often imitated. He won Nobel and Pulitzer prizes for his work. If you want to write in Hemingway’s style, look no further than the Hemingway Editor app!

Beyond imitation, countless writers cite him as an influence. Some of those writers were the pioneers of the hard-boiled noir genre, with rugged private detectives on the page taking cues from Hemingway’s characters and his own life [3]. Others were the founders of the minimalist literary movement. Even people in marketing and business analyze Hemingway’s style and apply it to advertisements and copy for a simple but bold effect.

How Hemingway’s Writing Influence Lives on Today

• His novels and stories remain popular: The Sun Also Rises is #25 in TIME magazine’s list of Top 100 Novels of All Time.
• His writing technique is still used: The Iceberg Theory, or Theory of Omission, is Hemingway’s minimalistic writing technique in which the writing is spare, and the underlying themes are never explicitly discussed. This technique is used by the Hemingway Editor App to improve people’s writing. It is also the style in which all of Hemingway’s dialog in the 2011 film Midnight in Paris is written.
• His words still resonate: In her 2020 song “Invisible String” Taylor Swift echoes the final words of Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.

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Sources

[3] https://www.criminalelement.com/hardboiled-hemingway-with-noir-chasers-ernest-hemingway-edward-a-grainger

Did you know that Hemingway first came to Idaho because of a publicity deal? In 1939, the newly opened Sun Valley Lodge invited him to stay there for free along with other celebrities to drum up interest. Hemingway was very much an influencer of his time, and the brand he created for himself leaves a legacy of celebrity as important as that of his literary career.

Hemingway the brand was born when Hemingway published his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, in 1929. After the book’s publication, he was bothered by press releases that implied (incorrectly) the book was mostly autobiographical, and he decided to take his story and image into his own hands [1]. He began to publish colorful nonfiction accounts of his travels, the bullfighting rings in Spain, and his sportsman hobbies. Hemingway styled himself as a macho man of action – athletic, adventurous, and fearless.

The American public enjoyed reading about Hemingway as much as they enjoyed reading his works of fiction, and media took notice. The mass media revolution rose right alongside Hemingway’s literary and personal fame, and newspapers and magazines were as happy to publish the exciting anecdotes of Hemingway’s personal life as Hemingway was to supply them. Hemingway also took pride in publishing parts of his work in magazines, so that his writing could reach a larger audience [2].

Through this informal partnership with the media and his efforts to reach beyond the literary sphere to the general public, Hemingway was able to control his own narrative while achieving the fame he desired. He became famous not just for his writing but for his lifestyle, admired by people who didn’t even read his books but wanted to be like him – or at least get a taste of adventure through him. He was propelled to the status of an icon of his generation, and his larger-than-life persona became an inseparable part of his legacy.

Hemingway the influencer lives on in today’s books, music, film, product lines, lookalike contests, comic books, and more. The objects that Hemingway kept in his Idaho home tell the story of Hemingway nearly as well as he did during his lifetime and remain an embodiment of his brand after his death. This exhibit explores the enduring allure of Hemingway’s image – and the complicated man beneath it – through the material things he kept and left behind in his final years spent in Idaho.

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Sources

[1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/events-and-awards/forums/past-forums/transcripts/a-conversation-with-patrick-hemingway
[2] Fame Became of Him p. 6-12

Bon Vivant translates to “good living,” and Hemingway was famous for living it up. One of the most enduring aspects of his brand is his image as a heavy drinker. Hemingway’s drinking – and that of his peers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald – fueled the American stereotype of the alcoholic writer. He professes his love for alcohol in a letter to a Russian translator:

“Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure.” [5]

Hemingway also enjoyed sport and games as well as good food. Recipes associated with him and what he liked to eat continue to be memorialized in cookbooks and articles.

How Hemingway’s Bon Vivant Influence Lives on Today

• “Hemingway’s Whiskey,” is the title track of Kenny Chesney’s 2010 album. It is an ode to the hard-drinking Hemingway image.
• The Ernest Hemingway Collection is “the official home of the Ernest Hemingway collection of brand-licensing products. For over ten years the collection has represented the lifestyle, personality and enthusiasm for adventure espoused by one of America’s most celebrated literary masters.” On this site you can purchase everything from writing instruments to spirits to culinary items and skin care and more.
• Recipe books like To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion and The Hemingway Cookbook feature recipes and stories from Hemingway’s life.

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Sources

[5] Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961