Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame

"Hemingway's hand holding a Parker 51 in a Life magazine ad hangs framed in my writing room, and it has always, oddly, made me feel closer to him. Matthew J. Broccoli's brilliantly conceived book, Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame, is full of just such public gestures, and it revivifies my connectedness to Hemingway and enhances my understanding of him in surprisingly rich ways. This is the most unlikely of absolutely necessary books"—Robert Olen Butler

"Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman have culled and collected a trove of significant material that, taken together, tells us more about Hemingway than most of the biographies and quite a lot, as well, about ourselves who gave the man's public myths a patina of credibility. This fine and useful book is a real contribution to our understanding of a great American writer."—George Garrett

"Ernest Hemingway didn't have talent, his talent had him, and it bounced him off the walls of his career until the end. His image is too much with us, his words on paper not enough. Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame goes one more step toward curing this and adds an extra dimension to a writer who deserves all the history he can get."—Alan Furst

"Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame is an invaluable and oddly riveting little volume about the Big Man that will delight the general reader and stimulate the student."—Christopher Buckley