Run For Your Lives!
Upon the recommendation of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway made his first visit to Pamplona, Spain, in 1923. The city is famous for its brilliant tradition of The Running of the Bulls, in which locals and (nowadays) thousands of tourists get drunk on wine and are chased by bulls through the streets. It’s partially Hemingway’s fault there are so many tourists as he wrote about the event, bringing it to the masses.
Bullfighting had such an impression on Ernest that he chose it as the setting for his first successful novel, 1926’s The Sun Also Rises. He attended the Pamplona Fiesta nine times and, in 1932, published a nonfiction guidebook about bullfighting called Death in the Afternoon. There is a statue of Hemingway in Pamplona. In 1925, the couple was joined by one Paulin Pfeiffer, a writer and journalist who became the second Mrs. Hemingway in 1927.
