An assemblage of reflections on the type of writing and the writer in one the greatest American writers from the twentieth century.

Throughout Hemingway’s career like a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing—that it takes off “whatever butterflies have on their wings as well as the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or talk about it.”

Not surprisingly belief, by the finish of his life he had done just what he intended never to do. In his books and tales, in letters about Ernest Hemingway on Composing to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, in interviews and in commissioned content articles about them, Hemingway wrote frequently about writing. And he had written as well so that as incisively about the subject as any writer who ever lived…

This book contains Hemingway’s reflections on the type from the writer and on elements of the writer’s life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway character comes through generally wisdom, wit, humor, and understanding, and in his insistence in the integrity of the writer and of the occupation itself.

—From the Preface by Larry W. Phillips