Everybody Behaves Badly
by Lesley M. M. Blume
The Sun Also Rises, it turns out, really happened. Hemingway took a bunch of jaded Parisian emigres fishing, and then took a bigger bunch to see the bullfights in Pamplona. They really did get into fist fights. They really did get into each others’ beds, and each other’s wallets. The stuff with the wineskins really happened. We don’t actually know that Hemingway had three martinis before lunch and then drank three bottles of wine himself, but there’s not a hell of a good reason to doubt it.
Lesley Blume has tracked down enormous detail about the months before and after this trip, months during which Hemingway’s first marriage broke up and Hemingway moved from promising but scarcely-published struggling artist to literary lion.