Ernest Hemingway on Writing

Amazon.com Review:
"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a slender book's worth of Hemingway's reflections on writing, culled from letters, books, interviews, speeches, and an unpublished manuscript.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

Author should be ashamed.:
This book is little more than sentence fragments and out of context quotations attributed to Ernest Hemingway. This book is not the least bit useful to a person interested in learning to write better. This book is not useful to a person hoping to learn more about the life or character of Ernest Hemingway. The book is 140 pages, but each page has almost as much white-space as text. This book is a sham, a scam, a ruse. (...) Or perhaps "assembled" would be a better word. (...) Save your money. Don't buy this book.

Hemingway Uncensored:
Eye-opening excerpts from many Hemingway letters to his closest friends, typos and all. Insightful and revealing. A must-have for any Hemingway fan or aspiring writer. Mice: Pick this up at your own peril. This is true Hemingway, he pulls no punches. Such a short read though, regrettably much too short, although the Hemingway gems scattered throughout this sparse booklet are still well worth the price. Being that he never intended this material to be published, it shows his honesty as a writer as much as it reveals in snapshot style, his honesty in how he lived and survived his short, magnificent life. It's editor (Phillips) unwittingly perhaps, might have made Hemingway proud after all. Including not one, but many of the truest sentences you'll ever read.

Good excerpts from Hemingway. Not a comprehensive book on the subject of writing:
I found the book interesting enough for a quick glance, but not fascinating enough to recommend it as a must-have. The book is comprised of excerpts from different sources that deal with the topic of writing. Since Hemingway never wrote extensively on the topic of writing, he considered it bad luck; this is the most thorough book on the subject for Hemingway fans. But BECAUSE Hemingway never wrote much on the subject, the reader has to settle for an incomplete tome on the subject of writing. In conclusion this is the best book on Hemingway's thoughts on writing, but not a comprehensive book on the subject.

Required reading for all journalism students and writers of all ages:
Although Hemingway was superstitious about publicly talking about writing -- and writing about writing -- it's lucky for us all that the editor captured and assembled this invaluable collection of his views on the topic. I've read this book several times, though it had the most impact on me when I first read it as a journalism student. While I never came close to the genius of Hemingway, his advice and views toward writing and reporting stayed with me and heavily influenced my life -- even giving me the travel bug that would take me around the world several times in search of adventure. All throughout my travels I kept a journal and tried to incorporate a little bit of Hemingway in each entry. "Ernest Hemingway on Writing" belongs on every writer's bookshelf.

Clean, well-lighted prose:
Ernest Hemingway changed the way people wrote. Victor Hugo, writing a mere fifty years before, has a sentence in 'Les Misrables' which spans two pages. After Hemingway, that, no one would dare. The editors have culled virtually all Hemingway's remarks on writing. Very useful to have in one place. I bought this little book on publication in 1984 - been with me ever since. Unlike other writing manuals, this one can be read piecemeal - savored in bits - like the poetry of the craft it is. Two favorites: "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, sh(...)t detector." (famous) "Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones." Think of 'The Old Man And The Sea'. Epic - transcendent - speaks to almost all of us - probably, for almost all time. But, it's only a story about some old fisherman Hemingway may have known and the one that got away. May have even heard the storyline somewhere.