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Leonard J. Leff. Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture (Lanham, Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield, 1997), xviii + 255 pp., $22.95 (cloth).
It is certainly no secret that the phrase "Ernest Hemingway" evokes not only a notion of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning author of many American classics, but also of a persona, a way of being and of seeing the world. In fact, words such as "manliness," "stoicism," and "grace under pressure" (a phrase that Hemingway coined) immediately come to mind. This is certainly no accident, as film and literary scholar Leonard Leff has shown in his recent book, Hemingway and His Conspirators, a fascinating study of a cultural figure who Leff proves no less fascinating. What he provides is part literary criticism (how Hemingway's early novels were written and published), part film history (how Hemingway's work was adapted for stage and screen), and part cultural studies (the America of the 1920s and early 1930s which helped him achieve his stardom as writer and cultural icon). In the end, his three-part approach proves it difficult-if not impossible-to view Hemingway as a cultural figure without taking into account the shadow that Hollywood cast over him as he wrote and revised his books (especially The...