TO DESCRIBE HEMINGWAY's next new book after A Farewell to Arms as a radical departure may not be strong enough to capture the astonishment many readers felt when Death in the Afternoon was published in 1932. It was nonfiction. It showed only occasional flashes of the spare style for which he had become famous. Yet for Hemingway the book was a labor of love, the chance to introduce the wider world to the intricacies of a sport that he considered a metaphor for life itself. Death in the Afternoon also allowed Hemingway to claim the mantle of “writer”—a person whose skill with words transcends genres. The mixed reaction to this bravura literary performance shifted the ground among critics, however, and started a downward turn in his reputation.

Death in the Afternoon

To be fair, many reviewers heralded Death in the Afternoon as a significant achievement. Ted Robinson (1932) was amazed that Hemingway could make bullfighting interesting to a wide audience. “Hemingway is a real artist,” he insisted, someone “who knows what he is doing and where he is going and so is a pleasing contrast to a large number of heavily publicized and aimless moderns” (11). Allen Cleaton (1932) called it “a fascinating volume,” written with the “vigorous masculinity, the capacity for seeing things freshly and clearly, the magical quality of communicating sharp emotions, that give Mr. Hemingway his towering position in modern literature” (5). George Grimes (1932) was equally impressed: “who would think,” he asked rhetorically, that a book on bullfighting would be “so interesting?” (7). John Adams (1932) believed the book would prove entertaining, and those who were not fond of bullfighting could still enjoy Hemingway's observations on literature.

Big-city reviewers also applauded the novel. Laurence Stallings (1932) described Death in the Afternoon as “a superbly colored and capricious essay on human pride” (34). Herschel Brickell (1932) said it “teem[s] with life, vigorous, powerful, moving and consistently entertaining” (12). R. L. Duffus (1932) felt Hemingway had not only explained the nature of bullfighting, but had pictured “the spirit in which it is done and seen” (5), although he was disappointed that the “famous Hemingway style” was not as evident as in his fiction (17).