The Hemingway Review

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the literary scene was riddled with imitators of the infectious and seemingly effortless Hemingway style. These included John Monk Saunders, a Hollywood screenwriter and wwi veteran who published the novel Single Lady in 1931. His narrative imitates the characters, dialogue, and storyline of The Sun Also Rises, but fails to capture any of the novel’s depth or dignity. The similarities between Saunders’s novel and Hemingway’s escaped neither critics nor Hemingway himself. The author of The Sun Also Rises wrote to his lawyer Maurice Speiser about Saunders when the film version of Single Lady prevented Hemingway from getting a good price for the movie rights to his own novel.