Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2015-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

I invented every word and every incident of A Farewell to Arms except possibly 3 or 4 incidents. All the best part is invented. 95 per cent of The Sun Also was pure imagination. I took real people in that one and I controlled what they did. I made it all up.

to Maxwell Perkins, 1933

Selected Letters, p. 400

Every writer is in much of his work. But it is not as simple as all that. I could have told Mr. Young the whole genesis of The Sun Also Rises for example. It came from a personal experience in that when I had been wounded at one time there had been an infection from pieces of wool cloth being driven into the scrotum. Because of this I got to know other kids who had genito urinary wounds and I wondered what a man’s life would have been like after that if his penis had been lost and his testicles and spermatic cord remained intact. I had known a boy that had happened to. So I took him and made him into a foreign correspondent in Paris and, inventing, tried to find out what his problems would be when he was in love with someone who was in love with him and there was nothing that they could do about it…

to Thomas Bledsoe, 1951

Selected Letters, p. 745

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