Hemingway and His Conspirators

The Democrat

An absorbing and penetrating look at the inside life of famed author Ernest Hemingway. . . . This book is rich in detail. . . . One of the best.
— Broox Sledge

The Boston Book Review

Hemingway and His Conspirators by Leonard J. Leff explores Hemingway's trajectory into international literary renown as a major celebrity of the 20th century. Leff shows how consciously and savvily young Hemingway built his public persona.

Leff deftly explores how Hemingway functioned par excellence as performer and reporter.
— Kiril Stefan Alexander, President of The Boston Book Review

American Studies

A fascinating study of a cultural figure.... Leff provides us with an excellent survey of one of the most famous and infamous cultural figures of this century.
— Joseph Fruscione

The Boston Book Review

Hemingway and His Conspirators by Leonard J. Leff explores Hemingway's trajectory into international literary renown as a major celebrity of the 20th century. Leff shows how consciously and savvily young Hemingway built his public persona.

Leff deftly explores how Hemingway functioned par excellence as performer and reporter.
— Kiril Stefan Alexander

Publishers Weekly

This short course on the author as commodity, icon and his own worst enemy, encompasses the first decade of Hemingway's career, ending with the stories in Winner Take Nothing (1933). By then, Leff contends, the writer's best work was behind him, done in by the Famous Author role pressed upon him by publisher, public, "sheikish" photos and his own conflicted connivance. Although young, the American celebrity culture was already hungry by the time Hemingway burst on the scene with the stories of In Our Time (1925). Leff, who teaches film and literature at Oklahoma State, draws a road map of 1920s publishing with its competing houses, magazines, literary coteries and such lures as Broadway, Hollywood and the Book of the Month Club. Hemingway's path, carved not only by The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, but also by his robust lifestyle, is as compelling now as it must have been then. Leff's freshest material is the courtship and marriage of Hemingway and his publisher: "If Scribners was more conservative than what it published, Hemingway was less modern than what he wrote." However Leff's contention that Hemingway succumbed to "the cancer of celebrity" by 1933, backed up by slack writing and Vanity's Fair's "Ernie" paper dolls, lacks evidence on the other side. Leff pulls the plug in an afterword and we watch the rest of Hemingway's career and life drain away in a few abrupt pages. Twenty-five b&w photos. (Oct.)

Kirkus Reviews

Though an entire book could be devoted to Hemingway's ambition or the cultivation of his popular persona, Leff's truncated work is too much a biographical recap.

"I want, like hell, to get published," the unknown Parisian expatriate confessed to a correspondent in 1923, long before he would become America's greatest authorial personality. Leff (Film and Literature/Oklahoma State Univ.) suggests that to do so, Hemingway made a Faustian deal with popular culture, "cultivat[ing] publicity even as he pretended to scorn it"—the kind of publicity available through having bestsellers, serializing in Scribner's magazine, and selling rights to the Book-of-the-Month Club, Broadway, and Hollywood. Hemingway's career began as the all-American cult of personality was born, promoted by Time magazine, radio, and the movie industry. Leff brings up some interesting points, such as Time's puffing of the new author's image as an adventurer in its review of In Our Time, or the parallel reviewers drew (to Hemingwya's annoyance) between the nymphomaniac heroine of the cheaply bestselling The Green Hat and Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Mostly, Leff sticks close to familiar biographical material rather than analyzing the context, or the apparatuses, of Hemingway's rise to prominence. Leff, the author of studies on movie mogul David O. Selznick and Hayes-era censorship, does better toward his book's end, discussing the production of the 1932 film version of A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway was irritated to see studio PR rehashing the inaccuracies of his legend, but he was also taken in by Gary Cooper playing Frederic Henry, who was based, of course, on Ernest Hemingway.

However, at the point where novelist's fame is secured, Leff abruptly leaves off, compressing the rest of his life into an afterword, almost impatient for the author to ride off into immortality.