It's so interesting to get to know a writing through his letters. It's like reading his fiction, but actually his real life. I'll come back to some of the letters again and again

Ernest Hemingway, selected letters, 1917-1961
So fascinating to hear the letters, who they are from and who he replies to and the subject matter.
You can follow his reporter career during the war and all the exotic places visited.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).

Hemingway fan! I'm on a roll. All thanks to The Paris Wife.

To be honest, I have not read this thoroughly but instead spent a leisurely day perusing the pages, reading the letters that caught my eye. Those of particular note were the ones to F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and my personal fave a letter to Senator McCarthy, calling his sorry ass out, that was likely never sent, but was wonderful all the same.

1917-1961 is a lifetime, from the age of 18 to the very end, and it is an excellent, exuberant read. There is some redundancy, as there must be, given the form. He is loose with his spelling, syntax, and grammar; and he is, at turns, wise, gossipy, principled, witty, bitchy, generous, ruthless, sensitive, bawdy, demanding, and (of course) prideful - he's everything he's supposed to be and a lot of small things you do not expect. There is a lot to learn in the sliding cuts and glimpses into his motor, his sincerity and phoniness, his awareness and ignorance, as well as the pleasures of his gossiping. Beating the pulp out of my favorite (modern) poet, Wallace Stevens! Noting Joyce's worries about his (Joyce's) work being too 'suburban.' His menopause theory of Stein! The constant talk of hunting and fishing is less interesting; but as a fisherman in my youth, I understand the need to talk about it. He also displays an able intelligence about writing and his estimations (and devaluations) of his contemporaries (like Dos Passos, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Pound, Stein, Anderson, etc.) are acute and brutal…but fair. Here, for example, he taps Faulkner in a letter to Harvey Breit: "He is a good writer when he is good and could be better than anyone if he knew how to finish a book and didn't get that old heat prostration like Honest Sugar Ray at the end. I enjoy reading him when he is good but always feel like hell that he is not better. I wish him luck and he needs it because he has the one great and un-curable [sic:] defect; you can't re-read him. When you re-read him you are conscious all the time of how he fooled you the first time. In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is because there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you learn something new. You do not just see the mechanics of how you were tricked in the first place. Bill had some of this at one time. But it is long gone. A real writer should be able to make this thing which we do not define with a simple declarative sentence." Hemingway wrote this passage in response to something Faulkner wrote to Harvey Breit (shortly after Faulkner received the Nobel): "Hemingway said that writers should stick together just as doctors and lawyers and wolves do. I think there is more wit in that than truth or necessity either, at least in Hemingway's case, since the sort of writers who need to band together willy nilly or perish, resemble the wolves who are wolves only in pack, and, singly, are just another dog." As you might suspect, Ernie did not let it go easily because he took up the topic again (only two days later) in another letter to Breit: "In the first place take the wolf part. Surely he has never seen a wolf in wild state or he would know that he is nothing like a dog. No one could ever mistake him for a dog and the wolf knows he [is:] not a dog and he does not have to be in a pack to give him dignity nor confidence. He is hunted by everyone. Everyone is against him and he is on his own as an artist is. My idea [is:] that wolves should not, and in a wild state never would, hunt each other. The part about doctor's and lawyers is that there is a secret professionel [sic:] and the good ones do help each other. Gypsies don't steal from other gypsies. They kill each other. But they do not prey on each other…" Finally, same letter, he gets cunning about Faulkner's writing (and drags along Fitzgerald as well): "Then if you need the longest sentence in the world to give a book distinction you might as well hire Bill Veek and have midgets. As a technician I would say that sentence was not a sentence. It was made of many, many sentences. But when he came to the end of a sentence he simply did not put in the period. It would have been much better if properly punctuated. As it was it was damned good but as always I felt the lack of discipline and of character and the boozy courage of corn whiskey. When I read Faulkner I can tell exactly when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with Tender Is The Night. But that is one of the things I thought writers should not tell out-siders. It is not a question of log-rolling or speaking well of each other. It is a question of knowing what is wrong with a guy and still sticking with what is good in him and not letting the out-siders in on secrets proffesionel [sic:]." These passages are why I found the reading so entertaining - the style of the prose, the blunt truthfulness of the message, and the touch of bitchiness, a sampling of the Hemingway pride. You need to trudge through some muck to get there, but get there you do. I look upon Ernie differently too - human, all too human, to be sure, but he was a serious man swimming in deep currents with a commanding mind. I found myself studying the dates of his letters and counting down to the date of his death, which I wanted to forestall because I'd finally found myself thoroughly at ease with the juxtaposition of the Legend and the Human. I'd also found Ernie increasingly sympathetic and pitied his swift degradation from physical and mental illness. There is no 'surprise' to his suicide. From the start his letters regularly finger the surfaces of death and suicide. In the end, I should have known, a writer does not become an artist, much less a great artist, without an almost debilitating sensitivity and a deep seriousness about his/her art - and so it was with Hemingway. The letters have inspired me to read his biography and re-read his great books.

Letters.

even if you do not like his novels, stories, writing style, persona, and whatever else, these letters of his spanning not only the greater part of his life but the lives of many other writers, editors, actors, soldiers, and real life characters is great reading.

It amazes me I even find time to read fiction when I can read the letters of those that came before and inspired us, left their mark with mere words, and vanished into deaths arms.
Hemingway spent many years in the Keys and cuba writing some of his most infamous work. It is exciting to hear him describe his progress as well as his new ideas that transpired into greatness.

Pg. 482 'started on another I'd had no intention of writing for a long time and worked steadily every day found that I had fifteen thousand words done; that is was very exciting; and that it was a novel [For Whom the Bell Tolls]. so I am going to write on that until it's finished. I wish I could show it to you so far because I am very proud of it but that is bad luck too. So is talking about it. Anyway I have a wonderful place in Cuba with no telephone, nobody can possibly bother you, and I start work at 8:30 and work straight through until around two every day. I am going to keep on doing that until it is finished. I turned down a lot of Hollywood money and other money and I may have to draw on you to keep goIng.'

*Ernest to max Perkins, key west -march 25 1939