ALL MAN! Hemingway, 1950s Men's Magazines

The Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway was a male icon in mid-20th century America, celebrated through numerous articles and images in pulp magazines which promoted what we would now regard as a highly sexist version of masculinity. Typically this included muscle-bound Tarzan types conquering a range of challenges from the impenetrable jungle to a yielding semi-naked heroine. The author of this book draws attention to the levels of post-traumatic stress in war veterans not only of World War II but also the Korean and Vietnam wars, and how American culture created a narrative of coping that arose out of the need to relive the war experience. Men's adventure magazines became a place where men could safely engage with sensationalised stories based on the traumas of battle, and these magazines also included pseudo-medical columns and ubiquitous female pinups. Wartime images of women embody the American ideal of womanhood, faithful, wholesome, often pictured with flags or saluting aircraft. But after the War the tone changed, becoming aggressively sexualised, using titillation and bondage to bolster a bruised masculine ego, and prompting one feminist to describe men's mags as an "undeclared war against American women". In 1959, a Man's Magazine article was entitled "Ernest Hemingway's Private War with Adolf Hitler", combining Hemingway's experiences on the Siegfried Line with his march to Paris. Such articles played down the fact that Hemingway was a war correspondent and never actually involved in fighting, although Rogue Magazine profiled him as suffering "ten concussions in combat". The "liberation of Paris" is one of the most persistent of Hemingway legends, and it is told here in a larger than life style, with "Papa" Hemingway, as he was known, depicted on the cover in his guise of he-man extraordinaire, together with an accompanying article on "How to prolong your sex life". A fascinating study of pulp magazines and Hemingway's role within them. 177pp, contrasting colour photos.
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