HEMINGWAY AND HIS CONSPIRATORS: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture.

By Leonard J. Leff. Rowman & Littlefield. 255 pp. $22.95

In 1960, newspapers around the world erroneously reported that Ernest Hemingway had died in a plane crash in Africa. One obituary claimed that he had been trying to reach the site of his story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." The author may have been amused by the media efforts to link his life and his art, but he had no reason to be surprised.

Leff, a film professor at Oklahoma State University, shows that Hemingway came along just as publishers were learning to promote authors like movie stars, a marketing shift that resulted partly from Hollywood’s transformation of popular books into even more popular films. From the outset, Hemingway recognized the conflict between celebrity and art, writing to his mother shortly after the publication of The Sun Also Rises (1926) that he wanted to "write as well as I can, with no eye on any market." Still, a part of him reveled in the attention. In a letter to his editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, concerning a planned media campaign, he enthusiastically offered "all the pictures you want."

After the failure of his novel Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway remarked in a letter that he was "getting pretty well rid of a good lot of unsought popularity." Soon after, though, Paramount released A Farewell to Arms, complete with a publicity campaign likening Hemingway to the courageous protagonist (played by Gary Cooper). The movie was a smash, and the novelist became more renowned than ever. According to Leff, this new measure of fame marked the end of Hemingway’s greatest creativity. For the rest of his life he remained first and foremost a celebrity, more interested in polishing his image than polishing his prose.

Who’s to blame? Leff implicates Hollywood, Scribners, the news media, and the culture, but he never lets us forget that the death of the artist, like the death of the man, was a suicide.

—Forrest Norman