Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises

by Lesley M. M. Blume

Overview

“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
 
“An essential book . . . a page-turner. Blume combines the best aspects of critic, biographer and storyteller . . . and puts the results together with the skill of an accomplished novelist. [This is] a complicated story, told masterfully.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Magnificently reported.” — Gay Talese

In the summer of 1925, Ernest Hemingway traveled to Pamplona for the infamous running of the bulls. He then channeled that trip’s drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into a novel that redefined modern literature. Lesley Blume tells the full story behind Hemingway’s legendary rise for the first time, revealing how he created his own image as the bull-fighting aficionado, hard-drinking literary genius, and expatriate bon vivant. In all its youth, lust, and rivalry, the Lost Generation is illuminated here as never before.
 
“Engrossing . . . Drawing on journals, letters, and autobiographies of many members of the artistic circles in which Hemingway moved in the early 1920s, Blume shows how ruthlessly Hemingway betrayed his mentors, skewered his friends in his fiction, and sought to advance his career at all costs.” — Boston Globe
 
 “Fascinating . . . compulsively readable.” — Houston Chronicle

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544944435
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	441,568
Product dimensions:	7.80(w) x 4.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

LESLEY M. M. BLUME is an award-winning journalist, author, and cultural historian. She contributes regularly to Vanity Fair, and her work has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Town & Country, and The Paris Review Daily. She is a New Yorker currently based in Los Angeles.
 

Table of Contents

Author's Note viii

Introduction ix

Part I

1 Paris Is a Bitch 3

2 Storming Olympus 19

3 Fortuitous Disasters 33

4 Let the Pressure Build 47

5 Bridges to New York 61

Part II

6 The Catalysts 79

7 Eve in Eden 99

8 The Knock Out 111

9 Breach Season 127

10 Dorothy Parser's Scotch 147

11 Kill or Be Killed 159

Part III

12 How Happy Are Kings 191

13 Sun, Risen 213

Epilogue 223

Acknowledgments 239

Notes 245

Text Permission Credits 321

Photo Credits 323

Index 325

Editorial Reviews

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Book of 2016? "The story behind Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is totally captivating, smartly written, and provocative." —Glamour "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 "Fiendishly readable ... a deeply, almost obsessively researched biography of a book, supported by a set of superb endnotes worth reading in their own right." —Washington Post "Masterfully told ... “Everybody Behaves Badly” is deeply evocative and perceptive, and every page has a Hemingway-like ring of unvarnished truth." —Christian Science Monitor "[A] must-read ... In Lesley M.M. Blume's latest release, escape to the real-life world of Hemingway's groundbreaking piece of modern literature, The Sun Also Rises. The boozy, rowdy nights in Paris, the absurdities at Pamplona's Running of the Bulls and the hungover brunches of the true Lost Generation come to life in this intimate look at the lives of the author's expatriate comrades." —Harper's Bazaar "[An] impeccably researched and resonant account of the true story behind The Sun Also Rises ... Everybody Behaves Badly breaks ground by stressing how important The Sun Also Rises was in bringing modernist literature to a commercial audience and, especially, the part Fitzgerald played in helping to encourage Hemingway and shape his manuscript." —The Financial Times “Without sounding unduly disapproving or moralistic, Blume gives us a portrait of the artist as a young opportunist … [an] excellent book.” —The Times Literary Supplement “My favorite book of 2016 ... a fascinating recreation of one of the most mythic periods in American literature—the one set in Paris in the ’20s—and about the writers and artists who were drawn there: Hemingway’s friends, mentors, lovers, and enemies. Everyone behaved badly indeed, Hemingway worst of all, which is one reason it’s hard to stop reading.” —Jay McInerney "As meticulous a history of the early 20th Century as it is a true drama-fueled page-turner starring characters like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Everybody Behaves Badly ticks both beach read and academic columns." —Tory Burch Daily "A spirited account of a spirited age, when writers saw an opportunity to change the culture ... Blume presents a sharp portrait of a young nobody desperately, sometimes maliciously, trying to become a great — if not thegreat — writer of his time.  Despite the wobbly tower of books about Hemingway, it seems we can’t keep from returning to him, and writers like Blume make it worth our while." —Los Angeles Review of Books "Thick with juicy details...[with] a fascinating epilogue ... Blume writes that the outline alone for her book ran to 1,400 pages. And every page of that labor is visible." —Dallas Morning News “[A] vivid character- and fact-filled book … One of the distinguishing features of Everybody Behaves Badly is just ho —

From the Publisher

03/01/2016
Journalist and author Blume (Let's Bring Back) focuses on the events in Ernest Hemingway's life from his 1921 arrival in Paris to the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926. Drawing on a rich cache of "Lost Generation" memoirs, as well as Hemingway's and his contemporaries' correspondence, the author portrays Hemingway as a ruthless egotist bent on achieving his literary ambitions, often at the expense of early supporters, including Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Robert McAlmon. Researching the actual trips that form the basis for the roman à clef's account of the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, Spain, Blume reveals how Hemingway transformed the lives of his expatriate friends by turning them into memorable characters in what was soon to become a masterwork of American literature. An epilog follows the lives of those depicted in the wake of the novel's publication. There is also valuable information on the story's editing, marketing, sales, and reception. VERDICT Bloom brings together in one place a wealth of information on Hemingway's first novel that will appeal to students and general readers alike. It may also lead those looking to delve deeper to peruse some of the author's sources, including Hemingway's own A Moveable Feast, Harold Loeb's The Way It Was, and Bertram D. Sarason's Hemingway and the Sun Set. [See Prepub Alert, 1/4/16.]—William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Library Journal

2016-03-08
The Lost Generation returns. In 1925, desperately ambitious Ernest Hemingway found the subject for his first novel in the antics of the hard-drinking, bed-hopping companions who accompanied him to a bull-fighting festival in Pamplona, Spain. Working feverishly, and with malice, Hemingway immortalized the misbehaving bunch in The Sun Also Rises, the novel that made him a literary star, acclaimed for the "terse innovative prose" that seemed stunningly modern. Journalist Blume (Julia and the Art of Practical Travel, 2015, etc.) offers a brisk rendering of a familiar Lost Generation story featuring its most colorful protagonist: Hemingway comes to Paris with his young wife, Hadley, who loses his manuscript on a train. During that time, Hemingway met Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Robert McAlmon, and Harold Loeb, most of whom he came to despise. F. Scott Fitzgerald, already famous, encouraged Hemingway and connected him with Max Perkins at Scribner's, who edited, published, and aggressively marketed The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway had an affair with the predatory Pauline Pfeiffer, which ended his marriage, and he defiantly created his image as a tough man, hunter, boxer, and predator. "Hemingway had a little bit of poison for everyone," writes Blume, "and he was becoming quite adept at co-opting the lives and vulnerabilities of others as grist for his literary mill." Of all those behaving badly, surely he was the worst, betraying his wife and many who mistakenly thought they were his friends. He wounded Sherwood Anderson by publishing a vicious parody of his work and responding to Anderson's pain with a pretentious, patronizing letter. Hemingway, Anderson and Stein agreed, was an "ungrateful protégé." Blume brings in some fresh material drawn from two interviews with Patrick Hemingway and with descendants of some Lost Generation figures, but most material comes from memoirs, biographies, and letters that have informed many other narratives. Though not groundbreaking, Blume's reimagining of 1920s Paris and its scandalous denizens is vivid, spirited, and absorbing.

Kirkus Reviews