Dorothy Parker on Hemingway
Ahhh ... I received the most perfect gift from my husband for my 20th wedding anniversary -- a portable hard drive containing every issue of the New Yorker through April 2006. I really could have used this when I was writing my piece on E.B. White. But no matter, it's here now and I'm loving it.
After searching the issues to see what was in the news the week I was born, I searched on Hemingway and turned up this gem of an opening paragraph from Dorothy Parker's October 29, 1927 review of Hemingway's short story collection "In Our Time." Oh, I can see the cigarette dangling from her lips as she wrote this. I especially love her comment about how the book reviewers welcomed him. So little has changed in the profession: book reviewers wouldn't be doing their jobs if they weren't annointing "The Next Great Author."
"Ernest Hemingway wrote a novel called "The Sun Also Rises." Promptly upon its publication, Ernest Hemingway was discovered, the Stars and Stripes were reverentially raised over him, eight hundred and forty-seven book reviewers formed themselves into the word "welcome," and the band played "Hail to the Chief" in three concurrent keys. All of which would have made Ernest Hemingway pretty reasonably sick."