The Birth of Hemingway’s \u3cem\u3eAfición\u3c/em\u3e: Madrid and The First Bullfight I Ever Saw

Describes the two historical bullfights that Hemingway conflated in the account of his first bullfight in the Toronto Star essay “Bullfighting a Tragedy” and later Death in the Afternoon. Mandel argues that recovering the actual details of Hemingway’s first bullfight is important because his “immediate, intense response to that event sparked his life-long involvement with Spain” and resulted in “some of the best American writing of this century.