EVERYBODY BEHAVES BADLY
The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises
The making of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world
In the summer of 1925, Ernest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town’s infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip’s maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into his groundbreaking novel The Sun Also Rises. This revolutionary work redefined modern literature as much as it did his peers,
The making of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world
In the summer of 1925, Ernest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town’s infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip’s maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into his groundbreaking novel The Sun Also Rises. This revolutionary work redefined modern literature as much as it did his peers, who would forever after be called the Lost Generation. But the full story of Hemingway’s legendary rise has remained untold until now.
Lesley Blume resurrects the explosive, restless landscape of 1920s Paris and Spain and reveals how Hemingway helped create his own legend. He made himself into a death-courting, bull-fighting aficionado; a hard-drinking, short-fused literary genius; and an expatriate bon vivant. Blume’s vivid account reveals the inner circle of the Lost Generation as we have never seen it before, and shows how it still influences what we read and how we think about youth, sex, love, and excess.
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Paperback
- May 2017
- 368 Pages
- 9780544944435
Buy the Book
$15.99
About Lesley M.M. Blume
Lesley M.M. Blume is an award-winning journalist, reporter, and cultural historian. She contributes regularly to Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal, and her work has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country, and Departures. She is a New Yorker currently based in Los Angeles.
Praise
“Brimming, addictive … in Everybody Behaves Badly, the party has just begun and the taste of fame is still ripe…the Lost Generation [is] restored to reckless youth in living black and white.” – James Wolcott, Vanity Fair
“The story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is totally captivating, smartly written, and provocative.” – Glamour
“Blume’s achievement is doubly remarkable. As an award-winning journalist and cultural historian, she revisits the intense nightlife of Parisian bars and cafes and the explosive, rivalrous drama of Pamplona in a chiseled, precise style that would please the master himself. By filling in Hemingway’s purposeful silences and omissions with the story’s real-life people and actual events, she accentuates the author’s artistic genius and enlarges our understanding of the novel’s complex characters and themes. This is a book for novice Hemingway readers as well as veterans of his work.” – The Tampa Bay Times
“Meticulously document[ed] … pacily written … Ms. Blume has drawn deeply upon many sources, particularly Hemingway’s own correspondence, to deftly portray the cast of lost characters, their thin-skinned vanities and their quarrelsome insecurities.” – The Wall Street Journal