Hemingway’s Advice on Writing and Reading and fishing in Cuba

Our choice extract this week:

BY MARIA POPOVA

"As a writer you should not judge. You should understand,"Ernest Hemingway(July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) counseled in his 1935 Esquirecompendium of writing advice, addressed to an archetypal young correspondent but based on a real-life encounter that had taken place a year earlier.

In 1934, a 22-year-old aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson set out to meet his literary hero, hoping to steal a few moments with Hemingway to talk about writing. The son of Norwegian immigrant wheat farmers, he had just completed his coursework in journalism at the University of Minnesota, but had refused to pay the $5 diploma fee. Convinced that his literary education would be best served by apprenticing himself to Hemingway, however briefly, he hitchhiked atop a coal car from Minnesota to Key West. "It seemed a damn fool thing to do," Samuelson later recalled, "but a twenty-two-year-old tramp during the Great Depression didn't have to have much reason for what he did."Unreasonable though the quest may have been, he ended up staying with Hemingway for almost an entire year, over the course of which he became the literary titan's only true protégé. 

Samuelson recorded the experience and its multitude of learnings in a manuscript that was only discovered by his daughter after his death in 1981. It was eventually published as With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba (public library) — the closest thing to a psychological profile of the great writer.

Hemingway (left) and Samuelson fishing and talking in Key West.

Shortly after the young man's arrival in Key West, Hemingway got right down to granting him what he had traveled there seeking. In one of their first exchanges, he hands Samuelson a handwritten list and instructs him:

Here's a list of books any writer should have read as a part of his education… If you haven't read these, you just aren't educated. They represent different types of writing. Some may bore you, others might inspire you and others are so beautifully written they'll make you feel it's hopeless for you to try to write.

This is the list of heartening and hopeless-making masterworks that Hemingway handed to young Samuelson:

1. The Blue Hotel (public library) by Stephen Crane
2. The Open Boat (public library) by Stephen Crane
3. Madame Bovary (free ebook | public library) by Gustave Flaubert
4. Dubliners (public library) by James Joyce
5. The Red and the Black (public library) by Stendhal
6. Of Human Bondage (free ebook | public library) by W. Somerset Maugham
7. Anna Karenina (free ebook | public library) by Leo Tolstoy
8. War and Peace (free ebook | public library) by Leo Tolstoy
9. Buddenbrooks (public library) by Thomas Mann
10. Hail and Farewell (public library) by George Moore
11. The Brothers Karamazov (public library) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
12. The Oxford Book of English Verse(public library)
13. The Enormous Room (public library) by E.E. Cummings
14. Wuthering Heights (free ebook | public library) by Emily Brontë
15. Far Away and Long Ago (free ebook | public library) by W.H. Hudson
16. The American (free ebook | public library) by Henry James

Not on the handwritten list but offered in the conversation surrounding the exchange is what Hemingway considered "the best book an American ever wrote," the one that "marks the beginning of American literature" — Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (public library).

Art by Norman Rockwell for a rare edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/01/04/with-hemingway-arnold-samuelson-writing/