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

Lesley M M Blume

Book cover for Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece the Sun Also Rises
Book cover for Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece the Sun Also Rises

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

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

Lesley M M Blume

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Description

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.

About the Author

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 Vogue, Town & Country, Departures, and many others. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Critical 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 --

Publishing Information

Publisher: Mariner Books
Pub date: 2017-05-16
Length: 368 pages

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