Does the world need 17 volumes of Hemingway’s letters?

‘In the years since 1961 Hemingway’s reputation as “the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare” shrank to the extent that many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large had been bamboozled, somehow.’ So wrote Raymond Carver in the New York Times in 1981. My, how times have changed.

In the past 12 months alone this reviewer has seen Hemingway elegantly caricatured in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, strut the West End stage thinly disguised as Jake Barnes in an adaptation of his novel The Sun Also Rises (a production on which I was pleasingly credited as ‘bullfighting consultant’), be traduced with neither art nor foundation in Paula McLain’s novel about his first marriage, The Paris Wife, and fascinatingly explicated in the monograph, Beyond Death in the Afternoon by Allen Josephs (who, unlike McLain, knows well the difference between a banderillero and a picador.