Hemingway Inc.

How did the great American novelist became the literary equivalent of the Nike swoosh?

From a piece on Slate...

Ernest Hemingway would be aghast to see what has become of Ernest Hemingway. Against the gray obscurity that awaits most writers in death, his image, 50 years later, has become the literary equivalent of the Nike swoosh or golden arches. Who doesn’t have a mental picture of the gray beard and safari shirt? Who couldn’t vamp a Hemingway-like sentence in a pinch? In Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s recent Oscar favorite, Papa turned up unsmilingly in a range of Jazz Age hideaways to make pronouncements about fighting men who are “brave and true” and who write with honesty and die with grace. Other recent work has burnished this image still further. Paul Hendrickson’s book Hemingway’s Boat narrates the novelist’s middle and late years through his interaction with the cruiser he loved. The Cambridge University Press not long ago released a fresh edition of his letters, offering new insight into his decades of adventuring. The most striking new portrait of the master may be yet to come: a made-for-TV adaptation of the love affair between the writer and his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, with Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman starring. The Hemingway of Hemingway & Gellhorn, trailers suggest, is an Indiana Jones-style buckaroo raging through war zones, chasing lovely dames, and wisecracking in the spirit of Jack Paar. “How’d you learn to have fun in hell?” Kidman’s character asks him. Quoth the great American novelist: “Family vacations!”