He had a bad heredity. His father was very overbearing apparently. His mother was a very odd woman. I remember once when we were in Key West Ernest received a large unwieldy package from her. It had a big, rather crushed cake in it. She had put in a number of things with it, including the pistol with which his father had killed himself. Ernest was terribly upset.
Authors Ernest Hemingway
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You remember the old story of how Hemingway would always record the number of words he wrote each day. When I learned that detail about Hemingway I understood why the poor chap went bonkers and did himself in at the end.
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Ernest gave a good speech if that’s what you like and his sum total was that war was pretty nice and a lot better than sitting around a hot hall and writers ought to all go to war and get killed and if they didn’t they were a big sissy. Then he went to the Stork Club, followed by a pack of foxes.
John Dos Passos
John Barth
Dawn Powell
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He applied the same strategies to every book, strategies as it happens that he came upon and invented quite early on in his career. They were his triumph in the early days. But by the last decade or two of his working life they trapped him, restricted him, and defeated him.
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But Hemingway did put together an hypnotic style whose rhythm haunted other writers. I liked some of the travel things—Green Hills of Africa. But he never wrote a good novel.
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He’s a supreme study of the writer as public figure and the hazards thereof.
E. L. Doctorow
Gore Vidal
John Updike
Ernest Hemingway’s opinions on others
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If Thurber can talk as well as he writes he must be one of the greatest and least boring talkers.
James Thurber
Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms