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" Ernest Hemingway would have turned one hundred on the twenty-first of this month, and no one would have much cared. His last novel would have been published two decades ago, and it was not good; his last good and true book would be nearly a half century behind him; and, as Leno&amp;#039;s people would have delicately put it, centenarian authors don&amp;#039;t make good TV.  Craig Kilborn might have had him on, and we can be thankful to have been spared that at least.  For Hemingway remains larger than life in death, larger even than any living author. Boozing, brawling, bearded, he is our idea of a writer. (See The Page, page 36.) Which inevitably raises the question: Where are today&amp;#039;s Hemingways? Or, for that matter, Fitzgeralds, Kerouacs, and Twains, writers celebrated as much for themselves as for their works, novelists who lead lives as interesting as, if not far more so than, the characters they create? Let&amp;#039;s start by blaming the media.  Having done that, let&amp;#039;s move on to blaming the victims. Because, c&amp;#039;mon, it doesn&amp;#039;t take much to earn renown these days. Writing may not be high on a low culture&amp;#039;s list of notable accomplishments, but fellatio, properly applied, can land one on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and well-breasted actresses can say almost anything at all and make the cover of a major monthly. If today&amp;#039;s best writers aren&amp;#039;t famous, they must be doing something desperately wrong.  Some try, of course. Tom Wolfe is perhaps the most deliberately presented author in America, but even he is little more than a striking public image; his literary pissing matches may be fascinating to the sixty-two readers of The New York Review of Books, but in terms of persona populi, he&amp;#039;s an empty ice-cream-colored suit. Anne Rice, Wolfe&amp;#039;s sartorial antipode, tries just as hard, taking out full-page polemics on assorted topics and arriving at book signings in a coffin, but we&amp;#039;re left less with a fully fleshed-out character than with the limitations of black as a slimming technique. As two-dimensional as any character they&amp;#039;ve ever written, these writers seem to be presenting themselves as the eventual end product of fame, prereduced to icon for public consumption; in the end, they seem almost smaller than life. Yes, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis lived larger for a while, but it was soon enough discovered that they weren&amp;#039;t writers in the traditional sense of being any good.  Most good writers can&amp;#039;t even be bothered to show up. Thomas Harris could be on the cover of Vanity Fair this month if only he&amp;#039;d let Annie Leibovitz shoot him chowing down on a plate of liver and a nice Chianti. But the Hannibal author doesn&amp;#039;t sit for photographers, and he hasn&amp;#039;t given an interview in more than twenty years, despite the fact that--or perhaps because--he used to be a journalist. Friends say he&amp;#039;s just a &amp;quot;regular guy,&amp;quot; though that could be fixed; Hannibal Lecter&amp;#039;s creator could easily be as famous as Bill Maher, a name that just popped into our head.  Douglas Coupland, of all people, has a point. His authorial shtick, perfect in its ironic shallowness, is to tour colleges with his own MTV-style video. Students meet not a writer reading words but wall-high quick cuts of the author&amp;#039;s mouth biting off epigrams, one of which, quite accidentally we&amp;#039;re sure, is insightful. &amp;quot;Suddenly,&amp;quot; Douglas Coupland&amp;#039;s mouth says, &amp;quot;in the last ten or fifteen years, people have just stopped having lives.&amp;quot; Perhaps the last writer to have one worth writing about was not coincidentally a Hemingway manqu\u00E9. But it really has been some time since Norman Mailer stabbed a wife or defended a murderer or even directed a hideous movie. The last time we saw him was on Montague Street in Brooklyn not too long ago. He waddled past us like a big, old Polish woman, dangling a plastic grocery bag that very distinctly held only a few containers of yogurt. It has been hard to take yogurt seriously ever since. Is it any wonder then that some magazines put swimsuit models on the covers of their summer fiction issues? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a850/esky-hemingway-0799/>