The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2, 1923-1925 (The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway)
With more than 6,000 letters accounted for so far, the project to publish Ernest Hemingway’s correspondence may yet reveal the fullest picture of the twentieth-century icon that we’ve ever had. The second volume includes merely 242 letters, a majority published for the first time. But they span the crucial early Paris years, and readers can watch Hemingway invent the foundation of his legacy in bullrings, bars, and his writing solitude. This is the Hemingway itching to get beyond the limits of journalism and to earn the respect of his literary elders. By the end, Hemingway’s first story collection, In Our Time, has been published in the U.S. to admiring reviews. He’s polishing his first great novel, The Sun Also Rises, and knocking out his nearly forgotten satire (and takedown of Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein), The Torrents of Spring. Some letters prefigure the cruelties he inflicted in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. It’s instructive to witness Hemingway’s writing voice change with the moment, and it’s cringe-making to watch him sling ethnic and racial slurs, especially to Ezra Pound. --Steve Paul