The American novelist, journalist and Nobel price laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) first visited the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, with his wife Hadley, in 1923, where he became fascinated by bullfighting. The Hemingways returned to Pamplona in 1924 and a third time in June 1925; that year they brought with them a group of American and British expatriates as seen on the image: Hemingway's boyhood friend Bill Smith, Harold Loeb, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Lady Duff Twysden with her lover Pat Guthrie. A few days after the fiesta ended, he began to write his most important modernist novel The Sun Also Rises, about a group of American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. Spanish bull-runners would wear white espadrilles with traditional ankle-lacing to hold the shoes securely in place on the run. Hemingway's undisputed love for the bull-running tradition is evident on this image, as we can see him proudly wearing the comfortable national runner's footwear.
