GAINESVILLE, FL—Shedding new light on the life of the celebrated author, literary historians from the University of Florida announced Tuesday that they had discovered evidence that Ernest Hemingway’s father had bulk purchased 70,000 copies of The Sun Also Rises to get his son on the bestseller list. “These findings suggest that this now-classic modernist novel might never have had the same impact if Hemingway’s dad, a wealthy physician, hadn’t bought up as many copies as possible to artificially inflate sales,” said researcher Abigail Gupta, confirming that her team had uncovered a massive warehouse full of unopened first editions that had been rented to Dr. Clarence Hemingway. “We first developed this theory after noticing that book jackets calling The Sun Also Rises a bestseller included a mark indicating suspicious purchasing activity. We believe these actions likely had a huge effect on the reception of the book, allowing the senior Hemingway to essentially purchase prestige in order to buy his son’s way into the literary canon.” Gupta added that there was also evidence that praise for The Old Man And The Sea was due to Hemingway planting paid reviews in a number of expatriate-friendly media outlets.

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