Hemingway: @ 125

Tonight I joined a book club that was celebrating Ernest Hemingway on the occasion of his 125th birthday. We focused our discussion around The Sun Also Rises, his first novel. It was a the first in a series of four Hemingway's books this year. 

I really enjoy Hemingway's writing so am looking forward to this series. 

A few memories and resources about Hemingway... 

Best Bar Moments in Venice - my blog post from2009 when I visited Harry's Bar in Venice, where Hemingway had a table

I have this on my wall: it's a doodle I made while
in Harry's Bar (read my blog post about the
version I left behind with the bartender)

So cool to see the doors of Harry's Bar
in Venice, then opening them and stepping in...

Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece 'The Sun Also Rises' by Lesley M. M. Blume - I just found this book and am listening to it now, and it's fantastic!

Ernest Hemingway with Lady Duff
Twysden, Hadley Hemingway, and three
unidentified people at a cafe in Pamplona,
Spain, July 1925, Wikipedia

The image above is the one that is on the cover of Everybody Behaves Badly... and it seems so fitting, once you realize The Sun Also Rises is based on this trip he made to Spain. 

The Undefeated

1968 standalone edition, Wikipedia

In my book club tonight one of the participants recommended Hemingway's short story, The Undefeated, as a companion to The Sun Also Rises, for a deeper look at matadors, Wikipedia

Ernest Hemingway's 8 Favorite Bars Around the World - Architectural Digest (great article, includes Harry's Bar) 

A Moveable Feast

I've been reading a lot of Hemingway lately, as well as biographies about him, so I really enjoyed reading A Moveable Feast for a book club.

A Moveable Feast is a 1964 memoir belles-lettres by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling expat journalist and writer in Paris during the 1920s. 

In November 1956, Hemingway recovered two small steamer trunks that he had stored in March 1928 in the basement of the Hôtel Ritz Paris. The trunks contained notebooks he had filled during the 1920s. Having recovered his trunks, Hemingway had the notebooks transcribed, and then began working them up into the memoir that would eventually become A Moveable Feast.

The memoir was published posthumously in 1964, three years after Hemingway's death, by his fourth wife and widow, Mary Hemingway, based upon his original manuscripts and notes. An edition altered and revised by his grandson, Seán Hemingway, was published in 2009.

The book details Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson and his associations with other cultural figures of the Lost Generation in Interwar France.

The memoir consists of various personal accounts by Hemingway and involves many notable figures of the time, such as Sylvia Beach, Hilaire Belloc, Bror von Blixen-Finecke, Aleister Crowley, John Dos Passos, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Pascin, Ezra Pound, Evan Shipman, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Hermann von Wedderkop. The work also references the addresses of specific locations such as bars, cafes, and hotels, many of which can still be found in Paris today.

The title of A Moveable Feast (a play on words for the term used for a holy day for which the date is not fixed) was suggested by Hemingway's friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner, who remembered Hemingway using the term in 1950.

A Moveable Feast is a play on words for the term used for a holy day for which the date is not fixed.

I have always been curious about the phrase A Moveable Feast... and had long discussions about the origins of this term with a friend, so I was glad to find this last tidbit!

Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea

Was just in a book club discussion about Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, so jotting a few notes for my own reference to come back to.

The Old Man and the Sea is a novella written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cayo Blanco (Cuba), and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction written by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.

Written in 1951, The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's final work published during his lifetime. 

In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.

In 1954, Hemingway wanted to donate his Nobel Prize in Literature gold medal to the Cuban people. To avoid giving it to the Batista government, he donated it to the Catholic Church for display at the sanctuary at El Cobre, a small town outside Santiago de Cuba where the Marian image of Our Lady of Charity is located. 

I listened to the Audible version (narrated by Donald Sutherland!). I have a lot more Hemingway to read before I feel like I really know this author (why have I not read him more until now?).

Hemingway's works

• (1925) In Our Time
• (1926) The Sun Also Rises
• (1926) Torrents of Spring
• (1929) A Farewell to Arms - read, great
• (1937) To Have and Have Not
• (1940) For Whom the Bell Tolls
• (1950) Across the River and into the Trees
• (1952) The Old Man and the Sea - read, loved it
• (1970*) Islands in the Stream
• (1986*) The Garden of Eden

* = posthumous publication

Update: returning periodically to update what I have read