Introduction: “The Most Interesting Man in the World”

Summary

His charm is so contagious vaccines have been created for it.

His beard alone has experienced more than a lesser man's body.

People hang on his every word—even the prepositions.

He lives vicariously through himself.

He is … [the] “Most Interesting Man in the World.”

RON MCFARLAND (2012) CITES THESE EPITHETS (and more) in his essay “The World's Most Interesting Man,” an examination of fiction in which Ernest Hemingway appears as a character. Anyone familiar with Hemingway who has seen the Dos Equis beer commercials instantly recognizes in the bearded actor with piercing eyes and chiseled features (actor Jonathan Goldman, as McFarland points out) the larger-than-life writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

Hemingway biographer Scott Donaldson (2009) once observed that “Hemingway died the most famous writer of his time, and (we can confidently say now) the most famous writer of the twentieth century” (15). John Raeburn (1974) argues that Hemingway was the first genuine celebrity among American writers, emerging not only as an important author but also as someone in whom the public was interested apart from his writing. Expanding on this idea in Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America, Joe Moran (2000) says Hemingway was the darling of the Luce magazine chain (publishers of Time and Life), appearing frequently in profiles or news articles. More than fifty years after his death, Hemingway's name remains a kind of shorthand, immediately conjuring up images of the macho, hard-driving, hard-drinking daredevil who lives life to the fullest. Popular books such as Marty Beckerman's (2011) The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within, Craig Boreth's (2012) The Hemingway Cookbook, and Philip Greene's (2012) To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion rely on the Hemingway image to sell copies even though the content of their books has little to do with Hemingway or his writings. Additionally, new biographies continue to draw attention not only from academics, but from major newspapers and popular periodicals as well. Long reviews in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and New Republic, to name a few, attest to the continuing interest in Hemingway's life and work. Papa, as he liked to call himself in his later years, continues to be appropriated as a fictional character in novels and stories long after his death (McFarland 2014).