Ernest Hemingway on Writing

"Throughout Ernest Hemingway's career as a writer," says Larry W. Phillips in his introduction to Ernest Hemingway on Writing, "he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing." Hemingway seems to have courted bad luck. Phillips has amassed a slender book's worth of Hemingway's reflections on writing, culled from letters, books, interviews, speeches, and an unpublished manuscript. These musings are arranged into topics such as "Advice to Writers," "Working Habits," and "Obscenity" (of which there is plenty here). Sometimes ponderous, other times offhand, these thoughts form a portrait of a man driven to create not solely the best writing he could, but the best writing, period. Hemingway craved exactness, both in his work and in the work of others; he strove to make every word necessary. "Eschew the monumental," he wrote to Maxwell Perkins in 1932. "Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones." His aim? Mere perfection. "I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit," he confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. "I try to put the shit in the wastebasket." --Jane Steinberg

• On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft
• Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity
• A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition
• Henry Miller on Writing (New Directions Paperbook)
• The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition
• Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times
• The Writing Life: Writers On How They Think And Work
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
• Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies
• On Writing