Seven years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, Ernest Hemingway, like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s privileged gentleman Richard Cory, “one calm summer night, / Went home and put a bullet through his head.” Only Hemingway used a twelve-gauge double-barreled English shotgun.
Victim to a family strain of depression, he felt himself a burnt out case at the age of 61, with nothing left to say and no new way to say it. Yet in the 57 years since that day, Hemingway’s popularity has never flagged. In 2017 Hemingway’s publisher, Scribner, sold well over 350,000 copies of his works in North America alone; no author in the publishing house’s hardcover Scribner Classics line has more titles in print: 24.
New biographies appear just about every year. Cambridge University Press is in the process of publishing 16 volumes (four thus far) of Hemingway’s 6,000 letters, and the Hemingway Collection is stored at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. In 2015 The Guardian placed The Sun Also Rises on its list of the 100 Best Novels.
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