The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume I, 1907-1922 by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon

There was a time when every alpha-male tyro author had to read Hemingway. He was an amalgam of Stephen Crane, François Mauriac and Errol Flynn, roistering war reporter, existential swaggerer and sexual aggressor, and a superb prose stylist to boot. When in 1978 Bruce Chatwin identified the literary masters whom an aspirant novelist should emulate, he recommended Chekhov, Maupassant, Flaubert and Turgenev for their piercing concision and stylistic richness, ‘and among the Americans, early Sherwood Anderson, early Hemingway and Carson McCullers’.

It is a good list for non-fiction writers as well as novelists. The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) — both drawing on experiences that are covered in this volume of Hemingway’s early letters — are great novels from which writers can learn. There is vaunting ambition in his later books, even if they sometimes seem overstrained. He deserved his Nobel Prize despite the stylistic tics.