"A Trick Men Learn in Paris": Hemingway, Esquire , and Mass Tourism

Abstract

While today we might think of Ernest Hemingway as the consummate traveler, in the 1930s he was just beginning to cultivate a traveler's identity in the pages of Esquire . As men turned to the magazine to sort out questions of style, Hemingway's notions of how to travel both reflected and shaped broader American conceptions of the meaning of travel experiences. Examining his Esquire essays in the context of the magazine's editorial policies, cartoons, and advertisements, Maier argue's that Hemingway's efforts to cultivate a traveler's identity both elucidate and amplify the central and persistent conflicts of mass tourism.

Hemingway's Cuban Landscape

“…Besides Hemingway's Pamplona, there are many other examples of authors whose novels are based on lives lived in real places resulting in the creation of literary landscapes and landmarks. These include classics such as William Faulkner whose novels were based on the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, Mississippi; Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird based on some of her childhood experiences in Monroeville, Alabama; John Steinbeck's California; and, of course, the Cuban landscapes in the novels of Ernest Hemingway, the focus of this essay (Hemingway and Brennen 2005;Babb 2011;Maier 2012;Watson 2013). I am interested in literary landscapes because they provide the literal and figurative ground for humanenvironmental interactions (Aitchison et al 2014).…”