“Glow-in-the-Dark Authors:” Hemingway's Celebrity and Legacy in Under Kilimanjaro

Abstract

Under Kilimanjaro captures a vital moment in Hemingway's career-long struggle to balance his celebrity with his work as an artist, a struggle supercharged in the 1950s by his anxiety over his declining health and the status of his literary legacy. Ostensibly a book about the author's second African safari, Under Kilimanjaro also offers an oblique meditation on the conflicting priorities and demands of the literary marketplace. Hemingway criticized commodification, celebrity, and inauthentic interaction with other cultures throughout his oeuvre. But in Under Kilimanjaro , his critique of the rampant commodification of the African landscape and the experience of travel is tied into a very intimate critique of the commodification of his own image.