Archive of Hemingway’s Newspaper Reporting Makes Fascinating Reading
This archive of Ernest Hemingway’s newspaper articles starts after World War 1 when he began working for the ‘Toronto Star’. He was in Toronto from 1920 – 1924 and the archive has over 70 of his articles from this period. His first article was titled ‘Taking a Chance for a Free Shave‘ and chronicled the young author’s visit to a barber college where straight-edge razors were wielded for free by students. He went on to write about boxing, trout fishing and organized crime in Chicago.
By 1922 Hemingway was in Paris and sent dispatches that anticipated the themes of the novels that would make him famous such as the effects of war, bullfighting and the life of a poor artist in Paris. His association with the newspaper gave him access to a Europe that he wouldn’t have had otherwise – his job as a reporter proving to be good training for what was to come.
This wonderful archive gives you plenty to explore, including commentary about the novelist’s early assignments and embedded annotations to help put the work in context. Hemingway developed his famously terse, hard-boiled style as a reporter at the ‘Toronto Star’ and was to rework much of his reportage into his fiction.
If you’ve ever read any of Hemingways short stories you might recognise elements of his fiction in articles such as ‘Tancredo is Dead‘, a piece about the death of a man whose job was to tease the bull by standing as still as a statue in the ring:
No. He was neither an opera singer nor a five-cent cigar. He was once known as the bravest man in the world. And he died in a dingy, sordid room in Madrid, the city where he had enjoyed his greatest triumphs.
This archive of his reportage is to look into the working processes of a fiction writer in the making.
Via Open Culture
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