Michael directs us to Hemingway's non-fiction

Ernest Hemingway (left) is a name that doesn’t come up often in any discussion of non-fiction.

That’s a shame.

His writing for various newspapers and magazines in the early part of the twentieth century is full of eyewitness accounts to some of the most exciting events during that period. He witnessed war and its aftermath. He saw Paris during the wild years between the world wars. He palled around with many of the era’s most interesting characters. And he wrote about it all.

Much of this early writing is gathered together in the volume "By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades" from Charles Scribner’s Sons Publishing. It’s a great example of just how creative newspaper journalism can be. (There are even some good first person articles for those of us who enjoy that kind of thing!)

Another title worth reading is "Hemingway on Writing" compiled by Larry W. Phillips, also from Scribner’s. Although Hemingway maintained that it was bad luck for a writer to talk about writing, he spent a lot of time and energy doing just that.

-- Michael Rowe