If you had "a Hemingway descendant becomes the internet's main character for a week" on your 2024 bingo card, congratulations, you're a prophet.
Elijah Hemingway, a 23-year-old aspiring model and self-described "creative," went from posting thirst traps to becoming a full-blown discourse grenade after his family issued what can only be described as a statement written by a PR team that hates them.
The Hemingways, America's original literary dynasty, apparently have thoughts about young Elijah's recent Instagram antics.
And by "thoughts," I mean they'd like everyone to know he is not the heir to anything except maybe a few awkward Thanksgiving dinners.
For those of you who have lives and missed this: Elijah posted a series of videos claiming he was "reclaiming the Hemingway legacy" by pivoting from "toxic masculinity" to something he called "soft power." This involved a lot of shirtless gym selfies, a podcast where he mispronounced "existentialism" three times, and a TikTok where he cried about his grandfather's "oppressive shadow" while wearing a $400 hoodie.
The internet, being the internet, ate it up like gas station sushi.
Then the actual Hemingways—the ones who still own property in Idaho and have opinions about fly fishing—released a statement.
It was three sentences long and somehow colder than a Chicago winter. "Elijah is a beloved member of our extended family.
We have no further comment." Translation: please stop calling us.
Naturally, Elijah responded with a 20-minute YouTube video titled "They Tried to Silence Me." In it, he compared himself to a modern-day Gatsby, which is hilarious because Gatsby was fictional and also died alone in a pool.
He also claimed his relatives "don't understand the digital age," which, fair.
Most of them probably still use flip phones and write letters with fountain pens.
Conservatives called him a "snowflake nepo baby." Progressives called him "a walking trust fund crisis." Everyone else just made memes.
My personal favorite: a side-by-side of Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize photo and Elijah's "crying in a mirror" TikTok, captioned "evolution is not real." Here's the thing that nobody wants to admit: Elijah Hemingway isn't interesting because he's a Hemingway.
He's interesting because he's a perfect mirror for our current cultural moment.
We have turned legacy into content, trauma into branding, and family drama into a limited podcast series.
For one week, people under 30 actually knew who they were.
That's more press than any of their books have gotten since high school English class. --- **The Take** Elijah is a 23-year-old doing what 23-year-olds do: embarrassing himself publicly and calling it a journey.
The real villains here are us for watching, and the algorithm for serving it up like it's news.
Final Thoughts
Also, someone please get this man a copy of "The Sun Also Rises" before he starts a GoFundMe for his "artistic exile."