A full generation after his death Ernest Hemingway remains one of the most famous American writers. Even those who have never read a word he has written, in school or college or on their own, are aware of his presence in the world of celebrity - a rugged macho figure called Papa with a signature white beard. The outpouring of recognition and praise that followed his suicide on the morning of July 2, 1961, nearly obliterated the boundaries of space and time. Hemingway's passing was memorialized by the Kremlin and the White House, in the Vatican and the bullrings of Spain. “It is almost,” the Louisville Courier-Journal editorialized, “as though the Twentieth Century itself has come to a sudden, violent, and premature end” (Raeburn 168). Manifestly, at the time of his death he had become to the general public something more - or less - than a writer of stories and novels. He had become a legendary figure, and seems fated to remain one. Critics and college professors lament this state of affairs. The spurious anecdotes and half-baked biographies and Key West contests for Hemingway look-alikes only serve to draw attention away from his work, they assert, so that the great unwashed public will not take him seriously.