Running Of The Bulls

This week it is the "running of the bulls" in Pamplona, Northern Spain, at the Festival of San Fermin. Young men have been participating in this ceremony since the 1600's, but Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" published in 1926, made it the event that it is today.
Gertrude Stein recommended to Hemingway that he take a vacation there to help him "clear his head" and concentrate on the business of writing a novel.
These photos are from 1925, one year before he finished his novel.
Top photo: Hemingway on the left, Harold Loeb, Lady Duff Twysden, Hadley, Don Stewart and Pat Guthrie.
(If you click on the bottom photo, you will see Ernest just in front of the bull as he participates in "the amateurs.")

Paris Street Scenes

Paris Street circa 1925
Some typical Paris street views in Hemingway's time there, 1921 - 1926.

First Novel Published

Fired with the fictional possibilities that he saw during his visit to the Pamplona bullfights in 1925, Hemingway started translating them into a novel, initially titled, Fiesta, soon after leaving the Spanish town. Within roughly two months, the first draft of what would eventually be titled The Sun Also Rises was done. Although this work is a classic today, one reviewer charged, at its publication in 1926, that Hemingway was hiding his talents "under a bushel of sensationalism and triviality." Many others, however, disagreed. One critic claimed that its "lean, hard narrative prose" put a good deal of "literary English to shame," and yet another noted that the novel contained the best dialogue to be found in contemporary fiction.
The celebrity that the novel brought him marked the beginning of the end of the early innocence of the Paris years.