Reviewed by: Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame: Statements, Public Letters, Introductions, Forewords, Prefaces, Blurbs, Reviews, and Endorsements David M. Earle Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame: Statements, Public Letters, Introductions, Forewords, Prefaces, Blurbs, Reviews, and Endorsements. Edited by Matthew J Bruccoli with Judith Baughman. Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2006. 145 pp. $24.95. As any author who deals with Hemingway's reputation must, Matthew Bruccoli acknowledges his indebtedness to John Raeburn's Fame Became of Him (1984), still the single best critical monograph on the construction of Hemingway's public persona. The fact that Raeburn's excellent book didn't immediately spark more studies of Hemingway's reputation is a testament to the deeply entrenched academic idea that modernism is separate from the marketplace. This idea, and the prevalent understanding of modernism's cultural stance as generally elite, has come under revision in the last few years. There has been a surge in materialist books including Lawrence Rainey's Institutions of Modernism, Derek Attridge's Marketing Modernism, George Bornstein's Material Modernism, and Aaron Jaffe's recent Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. Obviously Hemingway's celebrity makes him perfect for this critical trend, as evinced by Leonard Leff's important (yet flawed) Hemingway and His Conspirators as well as sections of Catherine Turner's Marketing Modernism Between the Two World Wars and Loren Glass's Authors Inc. Yet there is lots of room for further study. None of the aforementioned works does justice to the complexities of how Hemingway (or the Hemingway persona) captured the public's imagination. None looks at the role of his own self-marketing and characterization, measures how the media appropriated his image, or studies how celebrity affected his writing and private life. [End Page 146] Bruccoli's Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame contains the primary source material for filling in some of these critical gaps. This new compendium of Hemingway ephemera contains over one hundred items written by Hemingway and constituting his "Mechanism of Fame." They include "fifty-four statements and public letters; twenty introductions, forewords, and prefaces; twenty-nine blurbs, reviews, and endorsements" (xxi) and vary in importance from negligible to essential. Although I would recommend the book, I am at times tentative about its content and editorship. Bruccoli's preface states that the volume was planned prior to 1979, but was stopped with the death of Vernon Sternberg. If the book had appeared in the early 1980s, it would have proven a wonderful companion to Bruccoli's edited Conversations with Ernest Hemingway (1986). Since then, however, many of the longer, more important pieces have become available elsewhere, twenty of them in Robert Trogdon's Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference and its corresponding DLB volume. Examples from the Trogdon collection include New Masses articles such as "Conrad, Optimist and Moralist," "Who Murdered the Vets?," and "Fascism is a Lie." Much more interesting and harder to find are other longish pieces ranging from a short biography of Milton Wolff for an art exhibition catalog to Hemingway's forewords for Joseph North's Men in the Ranks (1939) and François Sommer's Man and Beast in Africa (1953). Yet the real charm of this book and its efficacy lie in the neglected ephemera: book cover blurbs, promotional copy for the 1953 Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus program, defensive letters to editors, and product endorsements. Taken singly, they are of "negligible" impact. Taken together, they help construct Hemingway's persona. Even if some of the pieces contained here are available elsewhere, the book's cohesive portrait of self-promotion relies on the onslaught of ephemera–the more ephemeral, the better. Reading the book from cover to cover, rather than dipping into it as a reference, gives the impression of unified self-marketing despite the fact that the material spans almost forty years. The trajectory of fame moves from bohemian insight (or pretension) to ultra-commercial product endorsement. The book offers surprises for the casual reader of Hemingway and, if not surprises, at least rediscoveries for the Hemingway scholar. For example, Hemingway's prefaces, introductions, and reviews for other authors' books illustrate his knack for self-promotion—what Bruccoli labels megalomania. [End...