Stranger on Earth

On May 10th of 1934, a month after the publication of his new novel, Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his friend, Ernest Hemingway, and asked for his honest opinion on the book — a tale about Dick and Nicole Diver, a couple based largely on mutual acquaintances of both Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Gerald and Sara Murphy. Hemingway certainly responded with honesty. His engrossing reply — a letter that contains plenty of advice for any writer — can be read below. (Note: Hemingway's spelling is shown accurately. For example, he twice wrote "write" where, presumably, he meant "right.") ( Source: Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961; Image: Ernest Hemingway, via. ) Key West 28 May 1934 Dear Scott: I liked it and I didn't. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald (goddamn it Dos took it with him so I can't refer to it. So if I make any mistakes—). Then you started fooling with them,...

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is now remembered as Ernest Hemingway’s most enduring work, not least because of its detailed and personal account of the Spanish Civil War. Its laconic treatment of the universal subjects of friendship, sex, and love – essentials that give additional meaning to life in times of war – is the reason for its lasting appeal. The plot is crudely simple, like the characters’ motives. American Robert Jordan decides to do his part for the country he claims to love by working as a dynamiter for a republican guerrilla unit, and one day, owing to an assignment to blow up a bridge, he finds himself among a group of disparate rebels hiding high up in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra. The novel records only three and a half days of Robert’s experience (and yet this is the longest Hemingway novel); at the end of the “adventure,” things go horribly wrong, as foreshadowed, and the reader is forced to leave the hero behind and move on – just like the re...

HEMINGWAY The ring of that surname alone is enough to conjure up in most people’s minds a host of unflattering descriptions: “male chauvinist pig” (a favourite amongst his feminist readers), “vacuous cad with a drinking problem,” “bullfight enthusiast stricken with machismo,” “Indiana Jones fancying himself a writer.” The man himself might have been all of these things, but what he was not was an unthinking, unfeeling man. This becomes apparent if one approaches his classic works A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises without the above-mentioned preconceptions; but if one really wants to know the man behind the brilliance of For Whom the Bell Tolls , one must get to him through his posthumously published memoir. A Moveable Feast – the 2009 Restored Edition allows the reader to do just that. Though it should be regarded as “fiction,” as dictated by Hemingway himself, it does invite the willing reader into the rambunctious world of the man, and along the way, he is treated...