International Imitation Hemingway Competition

Last updated

The International Imitation Hemingway Competition, also known as the Bad Hemingway Contest, was an annual writing competition begun in Century City, California. Started in 1977 as a "promotional gag", [1] and held for nearly thirty years, the contest pays mock homage to Ernest Hemingway by encouraging authors to submit a 'really good page of really bad Hemingway' in a Hemingway-esque style. [2]

Submissions have included such titles as "Big Too-Hardened Liver" (1992 winner), [3] [4] "The Old Man and the Flea" (2002 winner), "The Bug Count also Rises", "Across the Suburbs and Into the Express Lane at Von's" (2000 winner, Scott Stavrou) and "The Short, Happy Life of Frances' Comb."

The competition, as created, had two rules: mention Harry's Bar & Grill (the Venetian Harry's was long one of Hemingway's favorite watering holes) and be funny. [5] First prize was round-trip tickets and dinner for two at Harry's in Florence, Italy. [6]

In addition to the humor of the contest, there is irony in its existence, as Hemingway famously said: "The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal." Nevertheless, the contest had thousands of dedicated enthusiasts among writers and Hemingway fans, drawing more than 24,000 entries in its first ten years of operation. [7] Many notable literary figures judged the contest over the years, including Digby Diehl, Jack Smith, Ray Bradbury, Barnaby Conrad, George Plimpton, Bernice Kert, [2] Jack Hemingway, A. Scott Berg, and Joseph Wambaugh. [8] [9]

In the late 1970s, seeking to promote Harry's Bar & American Grill in Century City, California, bar owners Jerry Magnin and Larry Mindel consulted advertising executive Paul Keye, who suggested the contest to capitalize on Hemingway's literary references to "Harry's". [10] The contest announcement in The New Yorker magazine stated, "One very good page of very bad Hemingway will send you and a friend to Italy for dinner." [6] For the 11th Annual Contest, to promote the contest's move from (closing) Century City to the San Francisco Harry's, PR firm Tellem Worldwide recruited noted San Francisco authors Herb Caen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Cyra McFadden as judges. [7]

In 1988, after 11 years of contests, Spectrum Foods Inc., the new owners of Harry's in Los Angeles, ended their sponsorship of the contest because of escalating costs. [11] At this time literary organization PEN Center West took over sponsorship. [12] American Airlines' in-flight magazine American Way began printing contest-winning entries, and continued the grand prize of a flight to Italy. [1] In 2000 United Airlines assumed sponsorship of the contest, publishing winning entries in their in-flight and online Hemispheres Magazine. [13] United Airlines' support continued until the 2005 contest, [14] following which the competition ended. [15] The final winning parody was entitled "Da Movable Code." [16]

Hemingway's spare writing style had often been imitated prior to the contest. Since then, two anthologies of Imitation Hemingway have been published (The Best of Bad Hemingway, Volumes I & II) and include contest winners as well as satires of Hemingway written by E. B. White, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald and George Plimpton. [17] [18]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Takeru Kobayashi</span> Japanese competitive eater (born 1978)

Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi is a Japanese competitive eater. Described as "the godfather of competitive eating", he is a six-time Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest champion and widely credited with popularizing the sport.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martha Plimpton</span> American actress (born 1970)

Martha Plimpton is an American actress and member of the Carradine family. Her feature-film debut was in Rollover (1981); she subsequently rose to prominence in the Richard Donner film The Goonies (1985). She has also appeared in The Mosquito Coast (1986), Shy People (1987), Running on Empty (1988), Parenthood (1989), Samantha (1991), Small Town Murder Songs (2011), Frozen II (2019), and Mass (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Plimpton</span> American writer (1927–2003)

George Ames Plimpton was an American writer. He is known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. He was known for "participatory journalism," including accounts of his active involvement in professional sporting events, acting in a Western, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (BLFC) is a tongue-in-cheek contest, held annually and sponsored by the English Department of San José State University in San Jose, California. Entrants are invited "to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels" – that is, one which is deliberately bad.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition</span> Irish annual school students science competition

The BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, commonly called the Young Scientist Exhibition, is an Irish annual school students' science competition that has been held in the Royal Dublin Society, Dublin, Ireland, every January since the competition was founded by Tom Burke and Tony Scott in 1965.

<i>The Paris Review</i> New York–based English-language literary magazine

The Paris Review is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, The Paris Review published new works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Regeneron Science Talent Search</span> Award

The Regeneron Science Talent Search, known for its first 57 years as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and then as the Intel Science Talent Search from 1998 through 2016, is a research-based science competition in the United States for high school seniors. It has been referred to as "the nation's oldest and most prestigious" science competition. In his speech at the dinner honoring the 1991 Winners, President George H. W. Bush called the competition the "Super Bowl of science."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Saunders</span> American writer (born 1958)

George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scooch</span> British Eurodance group

Scooch is a British pop group, comprising performers Natalie Powers, Caroline Barnes, David Ducasse and Russ Spencer.

The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest is a contest in which students of all ages build Rube Goldberg machines to complete an everyday task in the style of American cartoonist Rube Goldberg. The contest is held internationally and, after the Covid-19 pandemic, digitally. Live regional contests and local and regional winners are eligible and invited to compete in the national contest.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miss Universe 2000</span> Beauty pageant edition

Miss Universe 2000 was the 49th Miss Universe pageant, held at the Eleftheria Indoor Hall in Nicosia, Cyprus on 12 May 2000.

The Finder Darts Masters was a darts tournament held in Egmond aan Zee, Netherlands, sanctioned by the British Darts Organisation and the World Darts Federation, running intermittently under several different names from 1995 to 2018.

"Alice Childress" is a song from Ben Folds Five's 1995 self-titled debut album. It was written by Ben Folds and Anna Goodman. The song is a look from a distance at the breakup of a couple who have fundamental differences in their outlooks on life.

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) was a contest sponsored by Amazon.com, Penguin Group, Hewlett Packard, CreateSpace and BookSurge to publish and promote a manuscript by an unknown or unpublished author. The first award was given in 2008 and in 2015 Amazon announced that they would not be continuing the award and would instead focus on the Kindle Scout program.

<span title="Dutch-language text"><i lang="nl">Nationaal Songfestival</i></span> Annual Dutch music competition

Nationaal Songfestival was an annual music competition, which was originally organised by the Dutch public broadcaster Nederlandse Televisie Stichting (NTS), and later by the Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) and the Televisie Radio Omroep Stichting (TROS). It was staged almost every year between 1956 and 2012 to determine the country's entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. The festival has produced four Eurovision winners and eight top-five placings for the Netherlands at the contest.

The Faux Faulkner contest was an annual parody essay contest founded in 1989 by Dean Faulkner Wells, niece of Nobel laureate William Faulkner, with her husband Lawrence Wells, and sponsored by Yoknapatawpha Press and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. It was held 16 times until 2005. The contest attracted as many as 750 entries in a single year from several countries as well as each of the 50 United States. The winners were published annually in Hemispheres magazine and often received coverage in other major media outlets such as USA Today and MSNBC. The contest has been on hold since 2005 while it seeks a new corporate sponsor.

The Los Angeles International Competitions event focuses on the wine, spirits, beer and olive oil industries. Distributors and makers in each industry submit entries to be judged by a panel of experts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ottessa Moshfegh</span> American author (born 1981)

Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel, Eileen (2015), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moshfegh's subsequent novels include My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arnold's Bar and Grill</span> Restaurant in Cincinnati, Ohio USA, founded 1861

Arnold's Bar and Grill is the oldest continuously operating bar in Cincinnati, Ohio, and one of the oldest in the United States.

Hemingway Days is an annual celebration of the life of Nobel Prize winning author Ernest Hemingway in Key West, Florida. The festival runs for three days each year, coinciding with July 21, Hemingway's birthday. The festival was founded in 1981 by Michael Walton as a promotional stunt for Sloppy Joe's Bar, of which Hemingway was a frequent patron when he lived in Key West. It most notably features the yearly Hemingway Look-Alike Contest, which is operated by the Hemingway Look-Alike Society.

References

  1. 1 2 Schwartz, Amy E. (August 12, 1994). Homage to Poppa and Pappy [ dead link ]. The Washington Post, p. A27. Retrieved June 15, 2010.
  2. 1 2 Smith, Jack (March 15, 1993). Wanted: One Really Good Page of Really Bad Hemingway. LA Times . Retrieved March 7, 2010.
  3. ↑ Smith, Jack (March 16, 1992) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-03-16-vw-2722-story.html
  4. ↑ Richards, Charles. "Contests Brings Out Hemingway, Faulkner Write-Alikes". AP News. Retrieved August 9, 2016.
  5. ↑ International Imitation Hemingway Competition Archived March 16, 2007, at the Wayback Machine Nelson Taylor, American Bizarro, St. Martin's Griffin, 2000. ISBN   978-0-312-26286-0. At 2Camels.com. Retrieved March 7, 2010.
  6. 1 2 Avins, Mimi (September 5, 2002). "The Bar Tanked: Many Suffered. The closure of Harry's Bar". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved June 15, 2010.
  7. 1 2 Tellam (2009). Case History – Harry's Bar & American Grill "11th Annual International Hemingway Contest" Tellam Corporate website. Retrieved June 15, 2010.
  8. ↑ 2000 International Imitation Hemingway Award. "Across the suburbs and into the express lane", Scott Stavrou. Personal website.
  9. ↑ "'Snooze Of Kilimanjaro' Is Best Of Bad Hemingway". Mohave Daily Miner. UPI. March 11, 1986. Retrieved June 16, 2010– via Google News Archive.
  10. ↑ "The Contessa is not at home, my Colonel," he said. "They believe you might find her at Harry's." "You find everything on earth at Harry's." – Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees (1950).
  11. ↑ Ringle, Ken (September 24, 1988). "At Harry's, A Farewell To Yarns". The Washington Post . p. C01. Retrieved June 15, 2010.
  12. ↑ Kissell, Joe and Jahnke, Morgen (October 19, 2004). Bad Fiction Contests. Interesting Thing of the Day; Alt Concepts
  13. ↑ "Sometimes you've got to be bad to be good". Hemispheres Magazine. February 29, 2000. Archived from the original on July 8, 2000. Retrieved March 7, 2010. Announcement of contest sponsorship.
  14. ↑ "2005 Contest". Hemispheres Magazine. 2005. Archived from the original on November 19, 2005. Retrieved March 7, 2010. End of contest sponsorship.
  15. ↑ "On Hemingway and the ideal of masculinity". Washington Post. July 20, 2017. Retrieved December 14, 2018.
  16. ↑ "2005 Imitation Hemingway Contest Winner". Hemispheres Magazine. 2005. Archived from the original on January 6, 2006. Retrieved March 7, 2010.
  17. ↑ The Best of Bad Hemingway Volume 1: Choice Entries. Harry's Bar & American Grill. Mariner Books; 1989. ISBN   978-0-15-611861-3
  18. ↑ The Best of Bad Hemingway Volume 2: More Choice Entries. Harry's Bar & American Grill. Harvest Books, 1991. ISBN   978-0-15-611866-8. Retrieved March 7, 2010.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.