NEW YORK (AP) — Hilary K. Justice, an Ernest Hemingway scholar at Boston's John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, remembers having to defend her chosen field of expertise as a graduate student some 30 years ago.
“I was told that studying Hemingway amounted to committing professional suicide — ‘Haven’t we killed him yet?’ was the comment of one professor in my PhD program,” she said in a recent interview. Justice oversees the Hemingway collection at the JFK library, where the author's papers are stored.
“I used to be able to count on being asked ‘How do you, as a woman, justify studying Hemingway?’ at every Q&A session at every public speaking event.”
This year marks the centennial of Hemingway's classic breakout novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” an occasion for scholars and fans to celebrate his work — and express relief that his outsized legend has receded enough that his books can stand or fall on their own. Hemingway died more than 60 years ago, and at least a generation of students has come of age knowing little about the man who for countless predecessors embodied the very ideal — or anti-ideal — of the writing life: the macho adventurer, drinker and womanizer who once famously defined courage as “grace under pressure.”
At a centennial event last month at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in Manhattan, Maya Hawke, Will Harrison, Sarah Pidgeon and other actors read from “The Sun Also Rises,” and a panel discussion featured “Bright Lights, Big City” novelist Jay McInerney and a handful of Hemingway descendants. Grandson Brendan Hemingway, a teenager during the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, spoke of female classmates approaching him in high school hallways just to tell him how much they despised the author.
“People decided that they'd project on to me whatever they liked or didn't like about Ernest Hemingway and were surprised that wasn't a great experience for me,” said Brendan Hemingway, now 65. “And the big thing for me at 100 (years of “The Sun Also Rises”) is for my daughter's generation that's all gone. We've outlasted the baggage. We've outrun the backlash. For my daughter's generation, you read him or you don't."
Justice and other Hemingway scholars say they generally encounter little resistance these days. Verna Kale, an associate research professor at Penn State, says she recently asked a group of students if they had ever read Hemingway and was told that none of them had. Ross K. Tangedal, an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and a member of the Hemingway Letters Project editorial team, said his students usually were “exposed to his work in small doses in high school.”
“So when they come to my college classroom they encounter the work before the myth,” he added.
Hemingway's 1926 novel follows British and American expatriates adrift in Europe, sustaining themselves on sex, alcohol, boxing and bullfights. It was a foundational text for the so-called “Lost Generation” of the post World War I era, and for many aspiring writers after. McInerney, 71, told the audience gathered at the Poetry Center that he first read “The Sun Also Rises” while in college and remembered how the novel “blew me away.”
“I couldn't believe how fresh it was and how it seemed really cool, to me” he said. "When the book was published, it essentially revolutionized English prose. It was a really radical new voice that somehow still spoke directly to me."
“The Sun Also Rises” is still popular, although its numbers fall well short of the book's famous contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby.” According to Circana, which tracks around 85% of the print market, “The Sun Also Rises” has sold just under 40,000 copies this year so far, down from a peak of more than 60,000 for each of several years in the 2010s. Over the past 20 years, sales in the U.S. have topped 1 million copies ("Gatsby" sales over the same time period approached 8 million).
Debra Moddelmog, who serves on the editorial board of The Hemingway Review, acknowledges that many readers familiar with Hemingway's image regard the women in his books as stereotyped and marginalized. But she thinks of Hemingway as a “deceptive” writer whose famously terse prose holds unexpected dimensions. She cites the libertine Lady Brett Ashley of “The Sun Also Rises" as someone whom close reading reveals to be a “complex character rather than the typical femme fatale.”
Justice notes that women hold many of the leading roles in Hemingway scholarship, including Moddelmog; Sandra Spanier, general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project; and Suzanne del Gizzo, editor of The Hemingway Review.
Kale, an associate editor for the Hemingway letters project and the editor of a Norton Library edition of “The Sun Also Rises,” is a self-identified Gen-Xer who started out as a student of medieval literature. She changed her focus after experiencing a Hemingway-esque epiphany as she read “The Sun Also Rises” — on a night train to Spain during a trip to Europe.
“I was just the right age to read it, and I became very interested in the expatriate modernists,” she said. “I’ve never had any misgivings about studying Hemingway whatsoever. I find his writing captivating, and documenting his life through his letters has become my life’s work.”
FILE - Novelist Ernest Hemingway appears at his country home in San Francisco de Paula near Havana, Cuba on Aug. 21, 1950. (AP Photo, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 2,000 flights were canceled Saturday as airlines across the U.S. worked to dig out from the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years, which stranded passengers and forced professional and college sports teams to scramble for alternate transportation.
Trump administration officials said new technology being added to the nation’s air traffic control system overloaded antiquated equipment and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, leading to the flight shutdown of more than four hours.
A limited number of domestic flights departed after the stop was lifted around 8:15 p.m. ET. But the effects could be felt for days, with officials saying the system is likely to be operating normally in time to handle the Thanksgiving travel rush.
The nationwide stop was the first since January 2023, when another key FAA computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Emily Brown and her 14-year-old daughter waited more than four hours Friday at the Dallas airport for their flight to Columbus, Ohio, before giving up. They were traveling to surprise her daughter’s best friend. Instead, she had to settle for phoning the friend through tears in the airport, Brown said.
“She saved up her money to buy her own ticket, and she’s planned this whole weekend,” Brown said. “Now we’re not sure when we’re gonna be able to go.”
Ruth Coles was stuck on her plane for more than five hours after landing at Los Angeles International Airport from Newark, New Jersey. She said the passengers were told they were waiting for a gate to open.
“The pilot keeps saying they are telling him we are next in line,” Coles said.
At airports across the U.S., passengers stared at screens showing delays or rushed to find buses or trains to their destinations. Some passed the time by breaking out in song.
Sports teams scheduled to play this weekend adjusted game start times, searched for hotel rooms, rescheduled flights and chartered buses.
Auburn University's football team opted to take a bus to Mississippi State and the Saturday start time was pushed from noon ET to 4:15 p.m. Other universities affected by the stoppage included Baylor, Washington, Kansas State, Minnesota and No. 19 Ole Miss, which did not plan to fly until Saturday morning for its game against Oklahoma.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy encouraged NCAA football teams to reach out to the FAA so the agency can prioritize flights for Saturday games.
More than 2,500 flights were canceled in the U.S. Saturday and hundreds more were delayed, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight disruptions.
Corbyn Wascher's flight was on the tarmac at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport for four hours Friday on his way home to Moline, Illinois, from a conference in Miami. Everyone was cordial on the American Airlines plane as they talked and stretched their legs and the flight attendants handed out water, pretzels and biscotti snacks, he said.
“The stewardesses were amazing. You could tell that they were pretty stressed out,” said the 37-year-old high school teacher, who took a $100 uber to a hotel 25 minutes from the airport after he was unable to find new flights. He was scheduled for a Saturday afternoon flight to Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House that no one was in any danger as more than 3,000 flights were safely landed Friday.
Duffy blamed Congress for failing to approve more funding for new technology, while downplaying the fact that trying to implement new fixes overtaxed the system. He suggested more disruptions might occur.
“We didn’t think we would have this kind of outage. We did,” he said. “We were able to review what went wrong, and then reboot the system and go. But, you will have more of these.”
Duffy said the problems were not linked to the FAA’s new AI-powered system the agency is rolling out to help predict problems in the sky because that isn’t connected to Friday's failure.
“This is all the old legacy equipment. All of the new equipment that’s been deployed did not go down,” Duffy said.
The FAA has already replaced thousands of old copper wires with fiber optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems as part of the overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion of funding. Duffy and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.
The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast, although that disruption was linked to a construction crew cutting a fiber optic line. Aging equipment was also blamed for the brief radar outages last year that disrupted Newark airport.
Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said the difference this time is it happened on a nationwide scale that left controllers unable to reliably talk to pilots.
“If you don’t have that ability, whether it’s because the old wires that they have are just run down or for whatever reason, you’ve got to stop airplanes on the ground and not put them in the air, where you’re going to risk not being able to communicate with them,” said Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot.
Friday’s ground stop also was different from the one after 9/11 because planes were not being told to land immediately and pilots likely were able to communicate with ground controllers at airports, Arroyo said.
Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska, and Golden from Seattle. Associated Press journalists Mead Gruver in Fort Collins, Colorado; Jessica Hill in Las Vegas; Ali Swenson in Chicago; Alex Veiga and Jaimie Ding in Los Angeles; Seung Min Kim and Aamer Madhani in Washington; and Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.
Passenger watch as workers unload luggage from a United plane as flights are delayed at Los Angeles International Airport Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope)
Passengers wait as flights are delayed inside a terminal at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
The sun sets over Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in DFW Airport, Texas, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
A passenger moves through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport as all flights are canceled or delayed, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
People wait at a terminal at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Arlington, Va., after the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
An agent helps travelers at a ticketing desk at LaGuardia Airport in New York, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Ryan Murphy)
