3 - The Hemingway Industry Takes Off: The 1960s and Early 1970s

Summary

HEMINGWAY’S SUICIDE IN 1961 spurred many tributes and several hastily published biographies by acquaintances like Pete Hamill, Jed Kiley, Milt Machlin, Lillian Ross, and A. E. Hotchner, even by Hemingway’s younger brother Leicester (who was fifteen years younger than Ernest and had no direct memories of Ernest’s childhood) and by his older sister Marcelline (married name Sanford). Hemingway was now an accepted canonical author, and thus the sixties also saw multiple publications of student guides to various Hemingway novels, including Cliff’s Notes, Barron’s Simplified Guides, Monarch Study Guides, and Merrill Studies (by such esteemed scholars as Sheldon Grebstein and William White). These study guides testify to two developments: first, contemporary American literature was now being taught in American high schools and colleges, so that publishers saw a market that had not existed before; and, second, Hemingway was a significant piece of that market. James Woodress, in his bibliography of dissertations on American literature from 1891 to 1966, lists no dissertations on Hemingway before 1950, but thirty-seven solely on him in the sixteen years afterward, one-third of them from Germany;1 there were forty more in the decade 1966 to 1976. Audre Hanneman’s bibliographies list six books and one pamphlet solely about Hemingway that were published in the 1950s in English (excluding bibliographies), and seven books in other languages: four Japanese, and one each in German, Belgian, and Dutch. I have already discussed the books in English: those by McCaffery, Atkins, Baker (his study and his initial essay collection), Young, and Fenton (the last two are published dissertations). In contrast, Hanneman, in both her original volume and its supplement, lists — excluding student guides, bibliographies, and encyclopedia entries — sixty books and pamphlets solely about Hemingway published during the sixties. Foreign books on Hemingway now included titles from France, Italy, Russia (including a book by Kashkeen), Poland, Korea, Spain, Cuba, and India. Hemingway was plainly now a world literary figure — the Nobel Prize attested to that — and the focus of articles, dissertations, and books galore. Bruce Stark’s bibliographic essay on Hemingway in Sixteen Modern American Authors, a survey of criticism from 1972 through 1987, is seventy-five pages long; it lists twenty-eight single-authored books on Hemingway for that fifteen-year period and sixteen volumes of essays.