Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture

This short course on the author as commodity, icon and his own worst enemy, encompasses the first decade of Hemingway's career, ending with the stories in Winner Take Nothing (1933). By then, Leff contends, the writer's best work was behind him, done in by the Famous Author role pressed upon him by publisher, public, ""sheikish"" photos and his own conflicted connivance. Although young, the American celebrity culture was already hungry by the time Hemingway burst on the scene with the stories of In Our Time (1925). Leff, who teaches film and literature at Oklahoma State, draws a road map of 1920s publishing with its competing houses, magazines, literary coteries and such lures as Broadway, Hollywood and the Book of the Month Club. Hemingway's path, carved not only by The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, but also by his robust lifestyle, is as compelling now as it must have been then. Leff's freshest material is the courtship and marriage of Hemingway and his publisher: ""If Scribners was more conservative than what it published, Hemingway was less modern than what he wrote."" However Leff's contention that Hemingway succumbed to ""the cancer of celebrity"" by 1933, backed up by slack writing and Vanity's Fair's ""Ernie"" paper dolls, lacks evidence on the other side. Leff pulls the plug in an afterword and we watch the rest of Hemingway's career and life drain away in a few abrupt pages. Twenty-five b&w photos. (Oct.)