Hemingway-inspired professor keeps running with Pamplona bulls

Bill Hillmann first read The Sun Also Rises at 19 and took Hemingway’s Pamplona myth seriously enough to build a life around it. East-West University in Chicago identifies him as Dr. Bill Hillmann, an assistant professor in the English and Communication Department and the school’s head boxing coach, while his own website says he has been running with the bulls for nearly two decades and has been gored three times.

Hillmann’s path shows how a novel can still reach beyond the page and into a ritual that mixes literature, athletic risk and public spectacle. He wrote Mozos: A Decade Running With the Bulls of Spain, adding his own experience to the body of writing that keeps Pamplona tied to Hemingway. On his website, Hillmann describes himself as an author, professor, journalist, bull-run guide, speaker, storyteller and writer’s retreat instructor, a profile that fits the strange overlap between classroom credibility and the physical demands of the run.

The run itself is tightly defined. The San Fermín festival runs from July 6 to July 14, and the encierro begins each morning at 8 a.m. The course is about 875 meters through Pamplona’s old quarter, with six fighting bulls accompanied by six bell-oxen. The event is free of charge, a detail that helps explain how a centuries-old ritual remains open to anyone willing to face its danger.

Hemingway’s role in that draw is hard to separate from the event’s modern identity. Pamplona’s tourism office says his 1925 visit influenced The Sun Also Rises, which was first published in 1926 and is marking its 100th anniversary in 2026. The tourism office also says Hemingway made the San Fermín fiestas “universal,” a literary legacy that turned a local celebration into a global reference point.

That legacy still matters because the attraction is not just nostalgia. Hillmann’s three gorings underline the physical reality behind the romance, and the route still puts runners in front of six fighting bulls on narrow streets lined with stone. For Pamplona, the appeal of the bull run endures because it offers more than a story borrowed from Hemingway. It offers the same adrenaline, danger and public theater that made the story last in the first place.