Donald Ogden Stewart

Of everyone who went to Pamplona in July 1925, Stewart is the one who arrived already famous. He was a professional humorist with a bestseller behind him and a seat at the most quoted lunch table in New York, and he was travelling with a young writer who had published almost nothing. Within eighteen months that had reversed: Hemingway had the novel, and Stewart had a part in it. He seems to have minded less than anyone else in the book — he stayed friendly, went to Hollywood, and won an Academy Award while the others were still answering questions about the fiesta.

Donald Ogden Stewart was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894, took a Yale degree in 1916, and served in the Naval Reserve during the war before turning to comic writing. A Parody Outline of History (1921) made him famous quickly and carried him into the Algonquin Round Table alongside Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. He was, by every account of the period, extremely good company, which is how he came to be in Spain.

He went to the fiesta at Pamplona with Ernest Hemingway in 1924 and again in July 1925, the second trip in the party that also held Lady Duff Twysden, Harold Loeb, and Pat Guthrie. When Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises weeks later, Stewart's professional wit went into Bill Gorton, the novel's funniest character and the one friendship in it that costs Jake Barnes nothing. Gorton is a composite: the fishing companionship belongs to Hemingway's boyhood friend Bill Smith, the comic routines to Stewart.

He moved to Hollywood and became one of its most reliable adapters of plays and novels, winning the Academy Award for the screenplay of The Philadelphia Story in 1940 and working on Holiday, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and Life with Father. He was also an outspoken socialist who led the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the League of American Writers, and in the 1950s the blacklist ended his American career. He moved to London in 1951 and stayed, publishing a memoir, By a Stroke of Luck, in 1975. He died there in 1980.