“Hemingway the artist is with us again,” exulted Edmund Wilson, America’s then-most influential man of letters, in 1940. He was referring to the writer’s Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, now 75 years old. What Hemingway had “returned” from, Wilson argued, was a knee-jerk Stalinism, imbibed from his time spent as a correspondent in the 1936-1939 conflict. In Wilson’s eyes, Hemingway had surrendered his artistic integrity by writing agitprop in To Have and Have Not (1937) and The Fifth Column (1938). In the 1937 novel, Hemingway seemed to eschew individualism by having his character make the dying declaration that “a man alone ain’t got no fuckin’…

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