Kenneth S. Lynn's biography of Hemingway states that behind Killers lay some obvious influences: Hemingway's firsthand acquaintance with petty criminals in Kansas City, his close observation of men entering back room in Venice Cafe, and steady attention he paid in 20s to journalistic accounts, in European as well as in American newspapers, of blood-drenched careers of Chicago hoodlums. (112). Behind story also is Hemingway's acquaintance by 1926 with and with idea of vaudeville. The connection has long been noted: in 1959, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren mentioned vaudeville team of Max and Al, and gag and dialogue that remind reader of their unreal and theatrical quality.(1) The essay is, however, only briefest of sketches on subject. By mid-1920s, entertainment had become part of visual and literary art. Music hall scores echoed in work of T. S. Eliot; lyrics of Broadway hits were reprinted in pages of E Scott Fitzgerald; and revues and Follies were described in fascinating detail in essays of Edmund Wilson. The expression the seven lively coined by Gilbert Seldes, was meant to include comics, dancers, and Krazy Kat - and to displace such bourgeois delights as grand opera. It was fate of one of those lively arts, vaudeville, to wax and wane with modernism. To be useful to Hemingway as a subject in 1926, two things had had to happen to vaudeville: first was its permeation of social world, second its recognition by intellectual world. We know that first of these happened because from W. C. Fields to Eddie Cantor and even to Ed Sullivan, vaudevillians not only dominated Palace and Ziegfeld Follies - hence imagination of much of New York - but also went on to radio and movies. The second happening was a consequence of first. A brief chronology: in 1922, became Great American Art for New Republic, in which Mary Cass Canfield wrote that it need not apologize for comparisons with Robinson and Frost, Masters and Sandburg. In fact, she thought it held its own with work of Mark Twain as a kind of artistic reaction to our native social repressiveness: Grotesque or not, represents a throwing away of self-consciousness, of Plymouth Rock caution, devoutly to be wished for. Here we countenance extreme, we encourage idiosyncrasy. The dancer or comedian is, sometimes literally, egged on to develop originality; he is adored, never crucified for difference. Miss Fannie Brice and Sir Harry Lauder are examples of performers who have been hailed, joyfully and rightfully, as vessels containing sacred fire, and who have been encouraged into self-emphasis by their audiences. . . . (225) Equally important was fact of universal intellectual acceptance: Darius Milhaud, George Auric and others write ballets and symphonies in which may be heard irresponsible cancan of ragtime. John Alden Carpenter, perhaps most vivid talent among our own composers, will occasionally shift from cooly subtle disharmonies, illustrating poetic or lyric subjects, to write a Krazy Kat Ballet. (226) Vaudeville was for intellectual world equal to other forms of artistic composition. And it seemed to gain meaning when it was compared to modes of modernism. Throughout 1923, Edmund Wilson produced a barrage of pieces on ideas and personalities, and on meaning of dance, jazz, comic scripts, and revues. He identified some of leading comics and mimes, among them Bert Savoy, Johnny Hudgins, and Bert Williams. He speculated on satire of and especially on its urban modernist meanings. Wilson thought that Ziegfeld Follies were inherently part of his and Fitzgerald's literary world: Among those green peacocks and gilded panels, in luxurious haze of New Amsterdam, there is realized a glittering vision which rises straight out of soul of New York. …