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

Blume, Lesley M. M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0544944437 ISBN 13: 9780544944435

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2017

Synopsis

“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

 

About this title

From the Inside Flap

“Everybody behaves badly . . . Give them the proper chance.” —Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises
 
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 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.

From the Back Cover

“In this magnificently reported book, Lesley Blume deftly documents the genesis of Ernest Hemingway’s genius.” —Gay Talese
 
“With impeccable research, delicious details, illuminating insight, and chiaroscuro wit, Lesley Blume has written the bestbook on Hemingway in Paris since A Moveable Feast.” —Charles Scribner III
 
“This gloriously gossipy, compulsively readable account of Hemingway’s early years in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, and the rest of the ‘Lost Generation’ is a welcome successor to Paula McLain’s novel The Paris Wife. How did Hemingway turn the wild weeks of bullfighting in Pamplona and the alcohol-addled nights in Left Bank cafés into The Sun Also Rises? That’s the serious question at the heart of Blume’s well-researched book.” —Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens, Pulitzer Prize–winning authors of de Kooning: An American Master
 
“Blume has carved a mountain of original research into a riveting tale of Hemingway’s literary, romantic, and publishing travails.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0544944437
• ISBN 13: 9780544944435
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368