"Dear Mr. Hemingway": Modernism, the Market, and the Fan Mail Reception of A Farewell to Arms

Reading letters sent by "average readers" in response to Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, this article not only revises the reception history of the novel but also suggests the early-twentieth-century reader's role in the continuum of modernist literary production and consumption. In response to fan mail complaining about the novel's obscenity and impropriety, Scribner's developed strategies for marketing it to the masses, guiding and reassuring the skeptical middlebrow reader; yet Hemingway's more admiring and sympathetic fan mail also reveals the emergence of a "counter-public sphere" in support of the novel and opposed to the mass market bourgeois public.