Full Meddle Jacket: Marketing and Mainstreaming Early Hemingway

This essay offers close analyses of the dust jacket illustrations for Hemingway's early Scribner publications ( The Sun Also Rises, Torrents of Spring , and A Farewell to Arms ). While these illustrations seem, at first glance, to have little to do with the books' narratives, themes, or styles, they serve at least two functions worth recovering. First, the illustrations work to locate Hemingway in literary and cultural traditions whose values were understood and largely shared by the mainstream book-buying American public in the 1920s. In addition, informed by the discourses of paratextual theory and book studies, I argue that they are influential early interpretive readings by the jacket designer, interpretive thresholds informed by the illustrator's own understanding of the texts and their value.