Novelist and former boxer Bill Hillmann says he didn’t read a book recreationally until he was 20 years old. “I was too busy getting into trouble and playing sports and stuff,” he says. His outdoorsy father had urged him to read Hemingway, but Hillmann didn’t heed the advice until junior college: “I checked out ‘The Sun Also Rises’ from the library and read it in, like, six hours.”
The novel charged him with a desire not only to write, but also to travel to Spain and run with the bulls (the subject of his forthcoming memoir from Curbside Splendor).
In the Little Village apartment he shares with his wife, Enid, Papa Hemingway remains a prime influence.
“When I read ‘Islands in the Stream,’ I didn’t know I had depression,” Hillman says. “The power that book had in my life — it helped me not kill myself and made me want to connect with people in that way, through story.”