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Go Behind the Scenes of the Running of the Bulls
An offbeat journey to the legendary Spanish festival 100 years after the life-changing trip that inspired Ernest Hemingway to write “The Sun Also Rises”
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Key takeaways: What is the running of the bulls?
- One of Europe's most popular gatherings, the running of the bulls takes place over nine days in Pamplona, Spain. Each morning, a small herd of bulls runs through the village streets, chasing thousands of participants clad in all white with red scarves.
- The festival catapulted to worldwide attention after the publication of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which chronicles the Spanish tradition.
In the annals of European travel, few summer holidays have been so artistically productive as the trip taken by the aspiring 25-year-old writer Ernest Hemingway in July 1925 to Pamplona, the elegant Spanish provincial town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. “Hem,” as he was called by his friends, traveled from Paris with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, to attend the annual Festival of San Fermín, whose most famous element is the running of the bulls, where mostly young men in white outfits with red bandanas and sashes race a dozen enormous bulls and steers through narrow cobbled streets, with the occasional bloody goring or stomping along the way.
It was an immersive event with an electric mood, as he had found during his first visit with Richardson two years earlier, when he had jotted notes: “Fifes, drums, reed pipes … red neckerchiefs, circling, lifting, floating dance, all day all night, leather wine bottles over shoulder, flat Basque caps or wide straw hats, faces like smoked buckskin, flat backs, flat hips, dancing, dancing …” He was dazzled by the spectacular daily bullfights, as well as the fireworks, bands on the plaza, packed cafés, cheap wine and faces in the crowd: the “faces of Velázquez’s drinkers, Goya and Greco faces.”
On their third and most dramatic visit to the festival, in 1925, Hemingway and Richardson were joined by five Anglo-American expat friends, all heavy-drinking, rootless bohemians like himself. The intense, alcohol-fueled, sexually charged interaction inspired Hemingway to write his first and arguably finest novel, The Sun Also Rises, using thinly veiled characters and incidents from the sojourn. The milestone of Modernist literature was published in New York the following year, immediately putting the young author on the path to international celebrity as the voice of the postwar “Lost Generation”—and, incidentally, changing Pamplona forever.
For centuries, the nine-day event had been just one of dozens of annual Spanish festivals, many of which also involve encierros, or bull runs. But its profile skyrocketed as The Sun Also Rises became a smash best seller and was later made into a 1957 hit film starring Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn and Ava Gardner. Largely thanks to the novel’s success—and Hemingway’s follow-up meditations Death in the Afternoon from 1932 and the posthumous The Dangerous Summer—San Fermín became established as the ultimate Spanish celebration. Today it is one of Europe’s most popular gatherings, luring more than a million visitors every year, with a round-the-clock party atmosphere that puts Mardi Gras in New Orleans to shame. It has become so popular that as many as 3,500 runners clog the bull-running course, making trampling the biggest danger.
And yet the American connection to Pamplona remains unshakable. Many American runners and spectators have attended for decades, along with niche groups of aficionados such as the New York City Club Taurino (Bullfighting Club), who relish the traditions and pageantry of San Fermín but don’t train as matadors themselves. “People who go to Pamplona inspired by Hemingway are surprised at first,” says Jennifer May Reiland, a young Brooklyn-based artist and club member. “It can seem like spring break in Florida. But the town’s traditional life still goes on behind the scenes. It’s still wildly romantic.”
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In fact, I first learned about the less visible cultural dimensions of the Sanfermines (as Spaniards call the festival) when Reiland invited me to attend several lectures at the Club Taurino, in a grand 19th-century townhouse in Manhattan’s West Village. One night, a Spanish fashion academic brought a collection of antique matador outfits known as trajes de luces, “suits of lights,” and discussed the new wave of women matadors. Another night, a Peruvian journalist explained how medieval Spanish bullfighting traditions were transformed in the New World. The Pamplona fiesta’s most passionate fans feel it is often seen superficially. “San Fermín is so much more than the running of the bulls and street parties,” said Lore Monnig, the club president, who has attended every summer for some 40 years. “There are the concerts, dances, social clubs, gastronomic societies, religious processions. It’s an all-consuming social and cultural event.”
Monnig, Reiland and other members offered to take me to meet the pamploneses, the people of Pamplona, and join gatherings filled with Spanish artists, gourmands and musicians. And so I found myself last summer rereading The Sun Also Rises and heading to the Pyrenees, hoping to glimpse behind the fiesta’s surface while piecing together the true story behind Hemingway’s generation-defining book.
Having lived in Paris with Richardson on and off since late 1921, Hemingway was a struggling writer who could be spotted scribbling in Left Bank cafés—a tall, lanky Midwesterner with unkempt hair, wearing sneakers, old trousers and a patched jacket. Handsome and charismatic, with boundless energy and an infectious, boyish smile, he was also an insecure bully, a side that emerged particularly when he was drinking. In the spring of 1925, he was also suffering from one of the cyclical bouts of depression that would mar his life. He was bogged down in his attempts to write a novel and frustrated that his poetry and short stories had appeared in obscure magazines but made no dent in the American market. Beyond the Left Bank cafés, he was virtually unknown.
But the depression began to lift when he and Richardson took the train from Paris to Spain in late June for a pre-fiesta fishing stopover, sending their young son John, “Bumby,” with a nanny to Brittany. Although they had little money, Hemingway and Richardson often took advantage of the strong American dollar and traveled widely in Europe. They had first visited Pamplona in 1923 on the advice of Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, and Hemingway had been instantly enthralled. It had become a summer tradition for the couple to meet friends at the fiesta—he later recalled the 1924 visit with writer John Dos Passos as “the godamdest wild time and fun you ever saw”—and the 1925 trip, their third, promised to be, he assured one invitee in a letter, “a damned good time.”
Just south of the border, the couple were joined for trout fishing in the Irati River by Hemingway’s boyhood pal from Michigan, Bill Smith, who had been best man at his wedding, and the American writer Donald Ogden Stewart, a regular member of the Algonquin Round Table in New York and a successful satirist. Even though they caught almost no fish, Hemingway’s melancholy promised to dissolve entirely when the group arrived in Pamplona on July 2 to convene with three other expat friends coming from Paris.
Instead, the vacation group was plunged into bitter infighting. The catalyst for the drama was Lady Duff Twysden, a 34-year-old socialite from the louche British upper classes who had become a scandalous minor celebrity in Paris for her beauty, her unique style and her many affairs. Slender and gray-eyed, with a ribald sense of humor, she sported a short, boyish haircut and wore eyebrow-raising androgynous clothes and fedoras. She was also an Olympic-level drinker—a bewitching combination to some men, who happily paid her massive bar tabs since she was perpetually broke.
Although Twysden arrived in Pamplona with her fiancé, a jovial young Scottish war veteran and alcoholic named Patrick Guthrie, jealousies erupted when it somehow came out that she had recently spent two weeks on a romantic liaison in a French coastal retreat, St.-Jean-de-Luz, with the final member of the Pamplona group: a monied, preppy and tightly wound 33-year-old Princeton University graduate named Harold Loeb. Hemingway already resented Loeb’s inherited wealth—he was the cousin of Peggy Guggenheim—and his literary success: Loeb was a founding editor of an arts magazine, Broom, and his first novel was about to come out in New York. Despite being married, Hemingway was infuriated by the news that Loeb had enjoyed a fling with the alluring Twysden. (Although there is no evidence that Hemingway and Twysden ever had an affair, he had become captivated by her in Paris.)
And when this fraught menagerie was thrown into Europe’s most raucous street party, emotions would soon boil over.
Hemingway biographers lament that recreating the 1925 trip is a challenge. In Pamplona, writes Michael Reynolds in Hemingway: The Paris Years, “time twisted and days became interwoven and inseparable,” making every participant’s memory “a work of fiction.” This was also a side effect of the fiesta’s wild and inebriated energy: “There seemed no point sleeping,” Reynolds adds. “Sleep was dead.”
Traveling to the fiesta a century later, I could sympathize. Even on the regional train from Zaragoza to Pamplona, the festivities were in full swing. Crowds of Spaniards and foreigners sprawled across the floor on suitcases and backpacks, sharing bottles of cava, the Spanish bubbly, and passing around plates of ham, cheese, grapes and olives, while outside flashed a rural world of abandoned farmhouses, Roman aqueducts and spired Gothic castles. Walking from the train station into Pamplona’s Old Town, I turned a corner and was plunged straight into the Dionysian frenzy. Every cobbled lane was blocked by revelers crowded outside the bars, all wearing white-and-red fiesta costumes. The origins of this traditional outfit are hazy, but white smocks had been worn since the Middle Ages by Basque peasants, and they were popularized by one of the working-class peñas, or social clubs, after 1929. The red scarves, according to one tradition, are in homage to St. Fermin, the first bishop and patron saint of the town, who was beheaded by the Romans around the third century A.D.
“At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded,” Hemingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises. The chaotic ambiance was fueled by cheap local wine, absinthe and Fundador brandy, and was exacerbated by having to shout every word to be heard. “Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.”
Today, music is still everywhere. Live bands and Basque flutists pirouette around gigantes and bigheads, dancers with enormous papier-mâché heads of historical figures including kings, queens and Moors. A stage is set up in a plaza for singers to perform cheerful regional songs with a mariachi-like lilt. All night the social clubs parade around the streets, blaring tubas, horns and drums. At one point, a trumpeter played an impromptu solo of a haunting traditional tune. He turned out to be Manuel Blanco, a star of the Spanish National Orchestra and Choir. “That’s what we call in Pamplona a momentico, a little moment,” one local said. “He’s the best trumpet player in Spain!”
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The appearance of Pamplona’s Old Town, flanked by a star-shaped stone fortress, has also changed little since Hemingway’s day. To follow his 1925 trail, I headed for the central Plaza del Castillo and stopped in at his favorite spots—Café Iruña, with its polished mirrors and worn tile floors, and Bar Txoko (pronounced “chocko”). The Hotel Quintana, where the expat group stayed (fictionalized as the Hotel Montoya in the novel), is now an apartment building, although its exquisite Art Nouveau facade remains.
Hemingway chose the Quintana because it was where the matadors stayed, and he assumed the role of the insider tour guide for his friends: He donned a Basque boina—the local beret—and took pride in chatting with the hotel’s owner, Juanito Quintana, about the minutia of the bullfights in his fractured Spanish. Much later, during an interview, Quintana remembered Hemingway unflatteringly as “a very strange person” with “a bad character.” The writer’s entourage was constantly drunk and rowdy, often stumbling back into the hotel at 3 a.m. and provoking complaints from other guests.
When Quintana confronted Hemingway one night, the writer made excuses until the hotelier warned him: “If you don’t let [matador Cayetano Ordóñez] sleep, tomorrow you’ll be fighting in the bullring yourself.” The matter of the bullfighter’s sleep made an impression on Hemingway. “No more, no more, Juanito,” he said.
The daily schedule of the festival begins, as it did then, at noon on July 6, by launching a rocket called the chupinazo, and for the next eight days has a running of the bulls every morning at 8 and a corrida, or bullfight, every evening at 6:30.
On my first morning, I got up at dawn, slugged down a café con leche, then squeezed among the spectators onto stone steps above Estafeta Street, part of the half-mile route of the running of the bulls, when the day’s six toros bravos, fighting bulls, destined for the evening’s bullfights, are raced from a corral to the stadium with six local steers (castrated bulls) that “guide” them along the route. Although difficult to pin down, the ritual’s origins are believed to date at least from the Middle Ages, when peasants brought cattle from the countryside to market in summer and ran the route themselves.
In photographs from Hemingway’s time, the most striking thing is how empty the route looks, with only a few dozen young farmhands scattering ahead of the bulls’ horns. These days, it becomes a river of white-and-red-clad runners, and the event is a major logistical production: In the pre-dawn darkness, workers erect wooden barricades along the route and remove them daily, and thousands of spectators gather alongside or hang from balconies above. Around 7 a.m., a loudspeaker blares the rules in Spanish and English—“The running of the bulls is not for everyone! It calls for composure, sobriety, good reflexes and outstanding physical fitness. … It is impossible to run the entire course. Do not incite the bulls, attract their attention or touch them”—while crowd members pass around newspapers with descriptions of the six animals’ names, weights and breeders.
Although it was originally an all-male rite, the bull-running rules were relaxed in 1974, and a sprinkling of women now join. At around 7:45 a.m., the runners sing a chant to a statue of St. Fermin asking for protection. Then, at precisely 8 a.m. one rocket is set off, and the bulls burst from the corral. The earth begins to shake as the animals, each one a small tank of muscle, thunder along the route at speeds of up to 20 miles an hour, scattering runners. The bulls are intent on reaching their goal—only if one is separated from the pack does it panic and lash out with its horns—so the runners’ challenge is to get out of the way. But thanks to the crowds, they can trip one another or pile up in bottlenecks and be stomped or gored.
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Some 200 medical workers are posted along the route to aid the injured, whose numbers range from 200 to 300 over the eight days. Even so, since records began being kept in 1910, 16 runners have been killed. The municipal website offers a gruesomely detailed list of fatalities, noting that a 22-year-old Illinois native was gored to death in front of the Town Hall in 1995 when a bull named Castellano “sliced through a kidney, punctured his liver and severed a main artery.” The most recent fatality was in 2009, when a 27-year-old from near Madrid slipped and was gored by the left horn of a rogue bull named Capuchino.
There is no record of Hemingway ever running with the bulls himself. But he and his male friends joined the crowds in the arena afterward, where they could play amateur matador against younger bulls with padded horns. On one occasion, Loeb managed to sit on a bull’s head and be carried around, making him the “King of the Ring” in Pamplona and stealing attention from Hemingway. Today, this “amateur hour” still occurs in the stadium with smaller heifers, although they can still pack a punch, as I saw when one luckless young man was hit by a horn in the jaw and lost several teeth.
Afterward, runners gathered outside Bar Txoko to sip chocolate or vanilla milk with cognac and gossip about the morning event, referring to dangerous stretches like La Curva, “The Curve,” a hard right-hand turn with a pocket dubbed “Dead Man’s Corner.” “If you run with the bulls long enough, something is going to happen to you,” confided a Canadian who said he ran for 17 years until a bull cracked several of his ribs and injured his neck. An Argentine runner confessed he had no feeling in his left arm due to nerve damage from being stomped. Others boasted about how often they had been hospitalized and delighted in showing off their scars. In 2019, some runners even held a sit-down protest against the encierro becoming too safe, after authorities began spraying the cobblestones along the route with an adhesive to prevent slips. As one Irish runner complained to me: “We’ll be running with the Labradors next!”
At 10 a.m., Monnig, the New York City Club Taurino’s director, led me to an unmarked 18th-century archway, only steps from Bar Txoko, that opened onto a grandiose marble staircase and up to a casino—not a gambling hall but a private social club where a dance party was underway, fueled by brandy, wine and cañas, small glasses of draft beer. The ballroom, a jewel box of ornate wood paneling, gilt mirrors and chandeliers, was packed with white-clad Pamploneses of all ages, dancing and singing to a live band and shouting from balconies at passers-by below.
A couple of hours later, we ducked down a side alley to another unmarked portal, which turned out to be the home of a gastronomic club called the Napardi Society. The hosts led us downstairs to the club’s historic cellar-kitchen, built into the medieval walls of the village. The guests included two retired matadors in their early 50s. Juan José Padilla was nicknamed “The Pirate” for his black eye patch, the result of a severe goring in 2011. The other, Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, casually chatted about his childhood connections to the United States, when he was sent to summer camp in Maine and military school in Indiana.
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I only realized I was in the presence of bullfighting royalty when Rivera Ordóñez mentioned that Orson Welles’ ashes are interred on the grounds of his family ranch. The Hemingway connection suddenly came to life: He was the great-grandson of the matador Cayetano Ordóñez, who had stayed at the Hotel Quintana in 1925 and appears as the handsome young matador “Pedro Romero” in The Sun Also Rises (“the best-looking boy I have ever seen,” Hemingway writes). What’s more, he was the grandson of Antonio Ordóñez, one of history’s greatest matadors—the Babe Ruth of the bullring—who features in Hemingway’s posthumous ode The Dangerous Summer and was fast friends with Welles, another aficionado. After Welles died in 1985, the director’s daughter decided to inter his ashes in a dry well on the Ordóñez family ranch in Ronda.
Afterward, as we strolled with the matadors through the streets, passers-by stopped in their tracks to stare, shout greetings or request autographs and selfies. Hemingway would have approved.
While the encierro is Pamplona’s most publicized event, devotees cherish a more exclusive ritual held every day at 1 p.m.: the apartado, or “separation,” of the six toros bravos in the special pen attached to the stadium. Again, Monnig led me through an anonymous-looking doorway into a self-contained world: An elegantly coiffed crowd of Spanish artists, politicians, bull breeders and lifelong aficionados gathered on two tiers overlooking the corral while sipping Andalusian Fino, a light sherry, as the three matadors were assigned their bulls for the evening by drawing lots from the mayor’s hat. True die-hards in the audience could also snack on criadillas, bull’s testicles. I passed, but many Pamplona restaurants offer bull on the menu, including estofado de toro, a rich stew that is surprisingly tender and tasty.
From there, we dashed to the annual luncheon hosted by the Club Taurino de Pamplona, which was founded in the late 1940s and has its headquarters near the stadium. Some hundred local guests sat at trestle tables laid end to end in a leafy park and were served mountainous platters of grilled meat, fish stews and salads. I found myself next to a doctor who worked at the emergency room in the bullfighting stadium: “It’s one of the best places in Spain to have an accident,” he boasted. “I have a full operating theater!”
News of social events was passed around by word of mouth. The next afternoon, Monnig got wind of a reception at a private bullfighting museum. It was opened in 1984 by a local aficionado named Marcelino Jiménez Elizagaray, in his own apartment, and lovingly preserved after his death in 2006 by his wife, Mari. This time, we climbed a series of creaking wooden stairs to find an Aladdin’s cave of artifacts: Every inch of wall space was covered with vintage posters, bejeweled matador outfits, antique photographs (one of Antonio Ordóñez posing with the bewhiskered Hemingway in 1959), and a handmade replica of an 18th-century bullring complete with hundreds of detailed human figures. The wine was flowing, a professional cortador (slicer) was cutting ruby red shreds from a side of ham, and a dozen white-clad tenors, among them members of bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey’s cuadrilla (support team), burst into a spontaneous rendition of the so-called “Astrain Waltz,” a refrain heavy with civic pride: “Because the festivities have arrived in this glorious city, which is something like no other in the entire world, riau-riau!”
At 6:30, Pamploneses converge on the central and most controversial ritual of the festival, the corridas, or “races,” as bullfights are known in Spanish. Some scholars speculate that bullfighting’s origins were in the Roman era or the Middle Ages, but the corrida began to take its modern form in the 1700s, when Spanish cattle ranchers vied to breed the most powerful and handsome bulls, like thoroughbred horses. Towns all over Spain developed festival rites that included different versions of the bull runs and often ended with men fighting the finest animals, with matadors in ornate, tightly fitting outfits taking to plazas on horseback and on foot. These diverse traditions were codified into a ritual that has changed little in the centuries since.
Today, the evening starts with a procession, when three bullfighters, their teams and stadium workers enter the ring and salute “the president” (who runs the event). The matadors each fight two bulls in contests that last for roughly 20 minutes, and end with the animal’s death. (The only way for a bull to survive is if the crowd demands that it is “too beautiful” and should become a stud—an extremely rare occurrence.) In Pamplona, the corridas occur only during San Fermín and are held in the majestic Plaza de Toros. The approaching road to the stadium was renamed the Paseo de Hemingway in 1967, and a bronze statue was erected of him at the arena’s entrance in 1968, glowering at visitors as he once did at anyone who questioned the value of bullfights. Tastes, of course, have changed. In recent years, animal rights activists in Europe and the United States have called for an end to the contests. There are critics even within Spain, and bullfights were banned for a time in Catalonia; they have also been banned in much of Latin America. Many foreign attendees at San Fermín have no stomach for the spectacle and spend their early evenings carousing in local bars instead.
Hemingway tried to explain to critics that bullfighting was not a sport. It was a tragedy, and his obsession with bullfights had a philosophical side. He was both fascinated and horrified by the senseless, random violence of modern life, having nearly been killed by an artillery shell at age 18 while volunteering as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I. In bullfighting, Hemingway discovered violence that was ritualized and controlled, and in which death was openly confronted. As Reynolds puts it, for Hemingway “it was like watching the war from a ringside seat.”
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Even in 1925, not everyone shared Hemingway’s passion for bullfighting. Richardson would turn her eyes away and embroider during the goriest parts, while Loeb admitted he was unimpressed, saying: “We all have to die, but I don’t like to be reminded of it more than twice a day.”
Whatever your opinion, the event’s extravagant pageantry makes it a living relic from the time of Cervantes and Velázquez, the vast open-air arena lit by the golden sun and packed with 19,500 people in white outfits and red scarves, roaring and singing. Seats are reserved year to year by the same families, and everyone knows their neighbors and brings wine and delicacies like tortilla sandwiches to share. The stadium seats are divided into sol and sombra, sun and shade, with the cheap upper tiers of the sun-blasted side taken up by the social clubs, whose bands play cacophonous music with tubas, trumpets and drums. These range from traditional romantic tear-jerkers to outbursts of “Jingle Bells” and even Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” The gleeful air of anarchy in Pamplona is very different from bullfights in Madrid and Seville, where the ambiance is so reverent that, the expression goes, “you can hear the bull breathe.”
After a few days of revelry—going to sleep at 3 a.m., waking up at 6 a.m., bull runs, lunches, aperitivos, dances—my constitution was reeling. A hundred years ago, the same regime made the expats’ behavior go from bad to worse. (“The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on,” Hemingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises.) Guthrie, Loeb and Hemingway jousted with one another to gain the attentions of Lady Duff Twysden, who provoked her admirers by flirting with the young matador Ordóñez. One night, she disappeared at a party and turned up the next morning with an unexplained black eye. Guthrie, her fiancé, took to casually goading Loeb about how Twysden now spurned him, while Loeb accepted the insults with a stoic passivity, mooning over Twysden, the others felt, like a lovesick puppy. Meanwhile, Richardson was appalled to observe Hemingway’s evident infatuation.
On the sixth night, tensions came to a head. Over after-dinner brandies in the plaza beneath exploding fireworks, Hemingway told Loeb that he should go back to Paris: “You’ve already done enough to spoil this party.” Loeb declared that he would only depart if Twysden asked him to. She refused, making Hemingway snarl: “You lousy bastard, running to a woman.” Loeb challenged the much larger Hemingway to a fight, and the pair went down an alley to punch it out. But as soon as they got there, the tensions diffused. When Loeb took off his spectacles, Hemingway joked that he would hold Loeb’s jacket. Loeb offered to hold Hemingway’s. They both laughed. “Duff,” Loeb later wrote, “no longer seemed to matter.” Hemingway even left Loeb a letter of apology the next morning, saying that he was “thoroly ashamed” of his behavior.
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On the last day of the vacation, when everyone was preparing to leave Pamplona, Twysden and Guthrie declared that they had no money to pay their hotel bill. Stewart “lent” the pair funds that he knew were as good as gone. The exhausted crew went their separate ways, scattering around Europe.
The fiesta was over, but their literary afterlives were just beginning.
Hemingway left Pamplona with a “lousy” feeling, he later wrote, but it faded as he and Richardson took the train south in a compartment with a wine salesman who shared his samples. The vacation may have been a fiasco, but it provided him with literary inspiration: In Madrid, he threw himself into writing in the mornings—scribbling furiously by hand on loose leaves of paper—and watching bullfights with Richardson in the afternoon.
Hemingway’s first pages were a cross between a memoir and a travel book, but soon he changed his friends’ names and fictionalized the situation—in particular, altering the narrator’s name from “Hem” to Jake Barnes, a war veteran who was wounded in the groin and made impotent, adding a hopelessness to his infatuation with “Lady Brett Ashley,” as Twysden was renamed. The free-living, hard-drinking Brett uses wit and jollity to mask her inner desperation. She also runs off to Madrid with the young bullfighter, and after refusing to marry him, has to be rescued, broke, by Jake. Along the way, the lovelorn Harold Loeb became “Robert Cohn” in a harsh (and blatantly antisemitic) characterization that turned Hemingway’s once-close friend into a figure of derision, one writer has noted, who was “a cross between a boob and a bore.” Richardson, meanwhile, was written out of the story entirely.
Within eight weeks, Hemingway had completed a draft. His friend F. Scott Fitzgerald helped him edit the manuscript, convincing him that the rambling first two chapters should be cut. The finished novel was published by Scribner’s in October 1926 to strong reviews and sales, with Hemingway’s terse style appealing to both highbrow literary circles and mainstream readers. The novel was elevated from a gossipy roman à clef to a literary event by an epigraph from Gertrude Stein, which proclaimed that the poorly behaved characters were in fact part of a “Lost Generation,” the first usage in print of this now-famous term. It’s difficult to imagine the book’s impact today, when every generation from the Beats to Gen Z has felt itself “lost.” But it gave expression to the existential malaise left by the First World War, which shattered traditional values and left its survivors purposeless. The novel was, biographer Mary Dearborn writes, “perhaps the first great novel of disaffected youth.”
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For the real-life characters, it meant the end of friendships. For the rest of his life, Loeb was puzzled as to why his friend Hemingway had betrayed him—Loeb had even helped get some of his early writings in print—and tried to set the record straight in a 1959 memoir, The Way It Was, and 1967 essay, “Hemingway’s Bitterness.” Although Lady Twysden had been reduced to the promiscuous Lady Ashley—“an alcoholic nymphomaniac,” Hemingway later called her character—she appears to have been more philosophical, telling one mutual friend in Paris, “Of course [Hemingway] said nasty things … but after all he was writing a novel. Who cares? Not me.” Still, they soon fell out of touch in Paris.
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Hemingway’s marriage to Richardson had also been damaged. His wandering eye soon focused on a mutual friend, the American heiress Pauline Pfeiffer, and the two began an affair. When Hemingway invited both his wife and lover to Pamplona in 1926, the trip was predictably strained, and when he and Richardson returned to Paris by train, they left via different station exits to separate homes. When he returned to the festival in 1927, Hemingway was accompanied by Pfeiffer as his new wife.
By then, The Sun Also Rises had put Hemingway on track to become one of the most celebrated American writers of the 20th century, establishing the macho persona he would build on for the rest of his life. Zelda Fitzgerald, for one, thought his bravura a fraud, sniffing that nobody could be “as male as all that.” Her verdict on The Sun Also Rises was just as caustic: It was about “bullfighting, bull slinging and bulls---.” Even so, it consistently appears today on lists of great American novels.
Hemingway continued to visit San Fermín throughout his life, although with a long interruption of 22 years thanks to the Spanish Civil War (which he reported on and made the subject of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls) and the subsequent military dictatorship of Francisco Franco. When he returned in 1953 with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, he was still not well known among the Spanish public. The Sun Also Rises had filtered into the country only through stray copies printed in Argentina, and many regarded it with bemusement. The following year, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. By his next visit to the festival, in 1959, Hemingway was at the height of his fame—now the bearded, bear-like “Papa”—and mobbed by well-wishers, autograph-hunters and journalists from Spain and beyond.
As for the San Fermín festival, it ends as it has for centuries, with thousands of townsfolk gathering before the Town Hall to sing “Pobre de Mí” (“Poor Me”), a lament that the nine days of madness are over. As people leave their bandanas by candles at the nearby church door, the mayor exhorts them to start their countdown for the next year’s party.
“I don’t know how you’re going to write a story about San Fermín,” Monnig said, when we met for one last drink on the way to the train station. “It has no beginning and no end. You think it’s over, but it’s not. Once you’ve been here, you’ll never really leave.”
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