The first few times I read The Sun Also Rises I was infatuated with the adventure of it all and distressed by nothing except that I had missed the fun. I especially liked the savoir-faire stuff—overtipping the waiters in France because they were rational and would remember you the next time.

Imagine my surprise when I finally noticed, picking up my daughter’s AP English assignment, that Robert Cohn, the anti-hero of SAR, had once, in California, backed and then edited a little magazine of the arts—“he discovered he liked the authority of editing. He was sorry when the magazine became too expensive and he had to give it up.”

I wasn’t too keen on having Cohn as my avatar—he acts badly much of the time, even as everyone else acts badly toward him. So I thought I’d unlock the roman à clef: Harold Loeb, 1891-1974; grandfather co-founded Wall St.’s Kuhn, Loeb; mother, née Guggenheim; prepped at Lawrenceville; wrestled at Princeton. After discharge from Army desk job, bought into bookstore on 38th and Fifth (cousin Peggy Guggenheim volunteered as clerk; uncle had founded Loeb Classical Library). Marriage fell apart; roomed with guy who’d run two litmags; inspired, founded The Broom (1921-23), greatest coup: Pirandello’s Six Characters. When patrimony ran low—and Guggenheim uncles declined to subsidize—folded Broom, moved to Paris, wrote novel—without using a’s or the’s.

Met Hemingway, aged 24; played tennis, sparred with him, outweighed by 40 lbs. Insisted his own publisher take Hem’s In Our Time. In 1959 memoir, The Way It Was, writes tenderly of week-long fling in St.-Jean-de-Luz with SAR’s “Brett.” In Pamplona, photographed using Fair Isle sweater as cape for one bull; being caught by another, lofted, but not gored.

SAR “annoyed me,” Loeb allowed later, “but I did not think of it as anti-semitic.” Valerie Hemingway, much later, said that, at least with her, Loeb could talk of nothing else: “how could Ernest have done this to me.”

After his third novel, Loeb repatriated himself and renounced la vie boheme. With the onset of the Depression, he espoused “technocracy,” a scientific solution to the woes of capitalism. In all, he wrote four books on economics and spent the rest of his career as a government administrator.

His memoir remains an excellent account of the endless hassles of putting out a little magazine.