A novel read at nineteen became a compass that pointed him toward both a profession and a practice.
In the summer streets of Pamplona, where Ernest Hemingway once found the raw pulse of human longing, an English professor named Bill Hillmann has spent twenty years asking whether literature can be more than a mirror — whether it can be a map. Inspired at nineteen by The Sun Also Rises, Hillmann built a life that honors both the analytical and the visceral, teaching Hemingway in seminar rooms while running alongside bulls each July at the San Fermín festival. His two-decade fidelity to a novel's vision raises one of the oldest questions in the human story: can fiction tell us not just who we are, but how we ought to live?
- A nineteen-year-old reads Hemingway and makes two promises to himself — neither of which most people would keep for twenty years.
- The bull runs of Pamplona are not romantic abstraction; runners have been killed, gored, and broken on those ancient cobblestones.
- Hillmann occupies a rare and uneasy position — parsing Hemingway's sentences in the classroom while physically inhabiting the world those sentences describe each summer.
- His dual life creates a tension between the safety of interpretation and the danger of lived experience, between knowing a text and testing it with your body.
- After two decades, the pursuit itself has become routine, raising the quieter question of what happens when chasing a dream becomes its own kind of ordinary.
Bill Hillmann was nineteen when The Sun Also Rises rewired something in him. Before he closed the final page, he had made two decisions: he would build a life around literature, and he would run with the bulls in Pamplona. Twenty years later, he has kept both promises.
Hillmann is now an English professor who teaches Hemingway to undergraduates, but every summer he leaves the classroom for Spain. At the San Fermín festival, he joins hundreds of runners in the narrow streets of Pamplona's old town as massive, unpredictable bulls thunder behind them. It is a peculiar kind of fidelity to a book — most readers carry a novel forward as memory or influence; Hillmann let it become a blueprint for how to live.
The bull runs are not metaphor. People have been killed, gored, and broken there. Hemingway's 1926 novel cemented the festival in the modern imagination as a place where a person could feel something authentic, and for Hillmann the appeal was never recklessness — it was the conviction that literature points toward something true about human experience, and that the only way to fully understand that truth is to live it.
What has emerged from this dual life is a particular kind of authority. Hillmann teaches Hemingway not as an outsider interpreting a text, but as someone who has genuinely tried to inhabit the world the novelist described. He understands both the seduction of adventure and its cost — the repetition, the way that chasing a dream can become its own kind of routine.
His story asks a quiet question: can a book change the trajectory of a life? For most people, probably not so literally or so long. But for Hillmann, a novel read at nineteen became a compass pointing toward both a profession and a practice. Every summer in Pamplona, he is still following it — still testing whether Hemingway was right about what it means to be alive.
Bill Hillmann was nineteen when he first opened Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. The novel did what the best books do—it rewired something fundamental in him. By the time he closed the final page, he had decided on two things: he would build a life around literature, and he would run with the bulls in Pamplona.
Two decades later, Hillmann has kept both promises. He is now an English professor, the kind of scholar who teaches Hemingway to undergraduates who may or may not have felt the same electric pull from those pages. But every summer, he leaves the classroom and travels to Spain for the San Fermín festival, where he joins hundreds of runners in the narrow streets of Pamplona's old town. The bulls come thundering behind them—massive, unpredictable, dangerous—and Hillmann runs.
It is a peculiar kind of fidelity to a book. Most readers finish a novel and return to their ordinary lives, carrying the story with them as memory or influence. Hillmann did something rarer: he let the story become a blueprint for how to live. Hemingway's prose had always been about the collision between desire and reality, between the romantic notion of adventure and the messy, sometimes brutal fact of pursuing it. Hillmann decided to test that collision himself, year after year.
The bull runs of Pamplona are not metaphor. They are real danger, real adrenaline, real consequence. Runners have been killed. Others have been gored, trampled, broken. The festival dates back centuries, but Hemingway's 1926 novel cemented it in the modern imagination as a place where a person could feel truly alive—or at least feel something authentic in a world that seemed increasingly artificial. For Hillmann, the appeal was not recklessness for its own sake. It was the idea that literature could point toward something true about human experience, and that the only way to fully understand that truth was to live it.
Twenty years of returning to Pamplona is not a casual hobby. It is a commitment that has shaped Hillmann's identity as surely as his academic work. He has become someone who straddles two worlds: the careful, analytical world of literary scholarship, where Hemingway's sentences are parsed and debated in seminar rooms, and the raw, physical world of the festival, where those same sentences become lived experience. His students read about Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley navigating desire and disillusionment in 1920s Spain. Hillmann has run the same streets they walked through in fiction.
What emerges from this dual life is a particular kind of authority. Hillmann teaches Hemingway not as an outsider interpreting a text, but as someone who has genuinely tried to inhabit the world the novelist described. He understands the appeal—the seduction of adventure, the allure of testing yourself against something larger and more powerful than yourself. He also understands the cost, the repetition, the way that chasing a dream can become its own kind of routine.
The story of Hillmann matters because it asks a quiet question about the relationship between literature and life. Can a book change the trajectory of a person's existence? Can fiction be a reliable guide to how we should live? For most people, the answer is probably no—or at least, not in such a literal, sustained way. But for Hillmann, the answer has been yes. A novel read at nineteen became a compass that pointed him toward both a profession and a practice, a way of thinking and a way of moving through the world. Every summer, when he returns to Pamplona, he is still following that compass, still testing whether Hemingway was right about what it means to be alive.
Notable Quotes
Hillmann's dual life as both literary scholar and bull runner gives him particular authority in understanding Hemingway's vision of authentic experience.— Implicit in his two-decade practice
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
What made Hemingway's novel stick with you in a way that other books didn't?
It wasn't just the prose, though that mattered. It was the sense that the characters were trying to live authentically in a world that kept pushing them toward fakeness. That felt urgent to me at nineteen.
And running with the bulls—that's your way of testing whether Hemingway was telling the truth?
Not exactly testing. More like... understanding from the inside. You can analyze the novel in a classroom, but you don't really know what he meant by that particular kind of fear and exhilaration until you've felt it yourself.
Do you think your students take Hemingway differently because they know you actually do this?
I hope so. There's a difference between reading about courage and having a professor who has genuinely put himself in danger. It makes the text less abstract.
Has the reality of the bulls ever disappointed you? Made the novel seem less true?
No. If anything, it's confirmed what Hemingway understood—that real experience is messier and more complicated than any book can capture. But that's not a failure of the novel. It's just the gap between imagination and life.
Do you think you'll keep running?
I don't know. At some point, the body decides for you. But as long as I can, I will. It's become part of how I understand myself.