Category Archives: Ernest Hemingway

The Great Gapsby? How modern editions of classics lost the plot

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F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is the latest title to appear in a cheap modern version after copyright expires

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It is one of the most memorable literary payoffs in history, the end of F Scott Fitzgerald’s defining novel of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby.

Yet this famous ending will be lost to many readers thanks to the proliferation of substandard editions, one of which loses the last three pages and instead finishes tantalisingly halfway through a paragraph.

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Books and films censored under Franco still circulating in Spain

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Dictator who died in 1975 stamped out mention of Spanish civil war, sexuality and anti-Catholic views

A Spanish association has called for an investigation into the enduring legacy of censorship during the Franco regime after it emerged that censored versions of books and films are still circulating more than four decades after the dictator died.

Emilio Silva, the president of Spain’s Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, sounded the alarm earlier this week after he stumbled upon a different version of the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life on television.

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Hemingway ‘wannabes’ celebrate author with lookalike contest

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Fans in Nobel prizewinner’s favourite haunt of Key West hold their 40th competition on his birthday

Ernest Hemingway is survived as much by his macho mythology as he is by his writing. Hemingway was in two plane crashes in two days. Hemingway shot himself in both legs while wrangling a shark. Hemingway had at least nine major concussions – and four wives. He had brain damage. He won the Pulitzer and the Nobel prize. He hunted and fished and wrote plays and books and articles and stories, for ever in pursuit of the truest sentence. He was rageful, charming, violent, brilliant and drunk.

Hemingway is also something of a Key West mascot, especially for a week every July, when a festival called Hemingway Days, which coincides with his birthday (this year, he would be 122) honours his legacy by gathering his lookalikes together.

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Ken Burns: ‘I felt that Hemingway’s uber-masculinity was a mask’

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The acclaimed documentary-maker on his six-part portrait of Ernest Hemingway, his 40‑year career, and working during a golden age of storytelling

Ken Burns, 67, is a veteran and celebrated American film-maker who has made more than 30 documentaries in a career lasting more than 40 years. Among them is a much lauded history of the American civil war and an equally rapturously received history of the Vietnam war. His six-part documentary on Ernest Hemingway is currently on BBC Four and iPlayer and there is a forthcoming series on Muhammad Ali.

What attracted you to Ernest Hemingway as a subject?
We’d been thinking about doing Hemingway for an awfully long time – Geoffrey C Ward, Lynn Novick [writer and co-director, respectively] and me – for literally decades, since the 1980s. We needed all that time to sort of ruminate. We knew there was a lot of new scholarship that would help complicate the picture, that it isn’t just this toxic masculine guy with a bunch of wives and a literary legacy, but even more interesting dimensions that would permit us to explore things at a greater depth. There’s a tendency, particularly in our media world, for everything to be binary: good, bad, yes, no, up, down. And we found Hemingway tantalisingly complicated, which is what we like, because it is faithful to human beings.

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Ernest Hemingway’s published works littered with errors, study claims

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Experts find hundreds of errors in the writer’s works, mostly made by editors and typesetters

Ernest Hemingway’s published writings are riddled with hundreds of errors and little has been done to correct them, according to a forthcoming study of the legendary writer’s texts.

Robert W Trogdon, a leading scholar of 20th-century American literature, told the Guardian that Hemingway’s novels and short stories were crying out for editions that are “as accurate to what he wrote as possible” because the number of mistakes “ranges in the hundreds”. Although many are slight, he said, they were nevertheless mistakes, made primarily by editors and typesetters.

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‘You’ve bollixed up my book’: letter reveals Hemingway’s fury at being censored

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The author threatened to ditch his British publisher, and likened him to a vicar, after his ‘Anglo-Saxon’ expressions were cleaned up

The hard-drinking, hot-tempered American writer Ernest Hemingway was furious when he discovered that the language for the English edition of his latest book had been cleaned up, a previously unpublished letter reveals. “I will make my own bloody decisions as to what I write and what I do not write,” he raged to his British publisher, adding that he did not want the book to be “bollixed up”.

The fury within the lines of the letter would have left Jonathan Cape in no doubt of Hemingway’s feelings about editorial changes to his 1932 nonfiction book about bull-fighting, Death in the Afternoon. That those changes were made without his knowledge or permission left him all the more outraged.

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Did Ernest Hemingway copy his friend’s ideas for Cuban classics?

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Some of the novelist’s best-loved work bears ‘striking resemblance’ to that of an unknown journalist

One was a Cuban newspaper reporter working to support his family and writing fiction in his spare time. The other was one of the world’s most famous novelists who came to Havana in search of inspiration.

New research shows that the themes and style in the writing of Enrique Serpa, a little-known Cuban author, find an echo in the works of Ernest Hemingway, who wrote some of his most notable books while in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s.

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