'The Sun Also Rises' at 100: Women are now leaders in Hemingway scholarship

NEW YORK (AP) — Hilary K. Justice, an Ernest Hemingway scholar at Boston's John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, remembers having to defend her chosen field of expertise as a graduate student some 30 years ago.

“I was told that studying Hemingway amounted to committing professional suicide — ‘Haven’t we killed him yet?’ was the comment of one professor in my PhD program,” she said in a recent interview. Justice oversees the Hemingway collection at the JFK library, where the author's papers are stored.

“I used to be able to count on being asked ‘How do you, as a woman, justify studying Hemingway?’ at every Q&A session at every public speaking event.”

This year marks the centennial of Hemingway's classic breakout novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” an occasion for scholars and fans to celebrate his work — and express relief that his outsized legend has receded enough that his books can stand or fall on their own. Hemingway died more than 60 years ago, and at least a generation of students has come of age knowing little about the man who for countless predecessors embodied the very ideal — or anti-ideal — of the writing life: the macho adventurer, drinker and womanizer who once famously defined courage as “grace under pressure.”

At a centennial event last month at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in Manhattan, Maya Hawke , Will Harrison, Sarah Pidgeon and other actors read from “The Sun Also Rises,” and a panel discussion featured “Bright Lights, Big City” novelist Jay McInerney and a handful of Hemingway descendants. Grandson Brendan Hemingway, a teenager during the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, spoke of female classmates approaching him in high school hallways just to tell him how much they despised the author.

“People decided that they'd project on to me whatever they liked or didn't like about Ernest Hemingway and were surprised that wasn't a great experience for me,” said Brendan Hemingway, now 65. “And the big thing for me at 100 (years of “The Sun Also Rises”) is for my daughter's generation that's all gone. We've outlasted the baggage. We've outrun the backlash. For my daughter's generation, you read him or you don't."

Justice and other Hemingway scholars say they generally encounter little resistance these days. Verna Kale, an associate research professor at Penn State, says she recently asked a group of students if they had ever read Hemingway and was told that none of them had. Ross K. Tangedal, an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and a member of the Hemingway Letters Project editorial team, said his students usually were “exposed to his work in small doses in high school.”

“So when they come to my college classroom they encounter the work before the myth,” he added.

Hemingway's 1926 novel follows British and American expatriates adrift in Europe, sustaining themselves on sex, alcohol, boxing and bullfights. It was a foundational text for the so-called “Lost Generation” of the post World War I era, and for many aspiring writers after. McInerney, 71, told the audience gathered at the Poetry Center that he first read “The Sun Also Rises” while in college and remembered how the novel “blew me away.”

“I couldn't believe how fresh it was and how it seemed really cool, to me” he said. "When the book was published, it essentially revolutionized English prose. It was a really radical new voice that somehow still spoke directly to me."

“The Sun Also Rises” is still popular, although its numbers fall well short of the book's famous contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby.” According to Circana, which tracks around 85% of the print market, “The Sun Also Rises” has sold just under 40,000 copies this year so far, down from a peak of more than 60,000 for each of several years in the 2010s. Over the past 20 years, sales in the U.S. have topped 1 million copies ("Gatsby" sales over the same time period approached 8 million).

Debra Moddelmog, who serves on the editorial board of The Hemingway Review, acknowledges that many readers familiar with Hemingway's image regard the women in his books as stereotyped and marginalized. But she thinks of Hemingway as a “deceptive” writer whose famously terse prose holds unexpected dimensions. She cites the libertine Lady Brett Ashley of “The Sun Also Rises" as someone whom close reading reveals to be a “complex character rather than the typical femme fatale.”

Justice notes that women hold many of the leading roles in Hemingway scholarship, including Moddelmog; Sandra Spanier, general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project; and Suzanne del Gizzo, editor of The Hemingway Review.

Kale, an associate editor for the Hemingway letters project and the editor of a Norton Library edition of “The Sun Also Rises,” is a self-identified Gen-Xer who started out as a student of medieval literature. She changed her focus after experiencing a Hemingway-esque epiphany as she read “The Sun Also Rises” — on a night train to Spain during a trip to Europe.

“I was just the right age to read it, and I became very interested in the expatriate modernists,” she said. “I’ve never had any misgivings about studying Hemingway whatsoever. I find his writing captivating, and documenting his life through his letters has become my life’s work.”