The ONLY THING THAT COUNTS: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence

Matthew J. Bruccoli, Emily Brown Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, is the leading authority on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the authors of the House of Scribner. (Publisher Provided) Scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli was born in the Bronx in 1931. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1953 and with a show more master's degree and a doctorate from the University of Virginia. He taught English at Ohio State University for eight years before joining the English department at the University of South Carolina in 1969. He retired in 2005 after teaching there for almost 40 years. He wrote over 50 books about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway including Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote biographies of John O'Hara, James Gould Cozzens and Ross Macdonald, compiled descriptive bibliographies on numerous authors and edited the letters and notebooks of other authors. He died due to glioma, a tumor of the brainstem, on June 4, 2008. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in the family home in Oak Park, Ill., on July 21, 1899. In high school, Hemingway enjoyed working on The Trapeze, his school newspaper, where he wrote his first articles. Upon graduation in the spring of 1917, Hemingway took a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. After a short stint in the U.S. Army as a show more volunteer Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy, Hemingway moved to Paris, and it was here that Hemingway began his well-documented career as a novelist. Hemingway's first collection of short stories and vignettes, entitled In Our Time, was published in 1925. His first major novel, The Sun Also Rises, the story of American and English expatriates in Paris and on excursion to Pamplona, immediately established him as one of the great prose stylists and preeminent writers of his time. In this book, Hemingway quotes Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation," thereby labeling himself and other expatriate writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford. Other novels written by Hemingway include: A Farewell To Arms, the story, based in part on Hemingway's life, of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse; For Whom the Bell Tolls, the story of an American who fought, loved, and died with the guerrillas in the mountains of Spain; and To Have and Have Not, about an honest man forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West. Non-fiction includes Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in East Africa; and A Moveable Feast, his recollections of Paris in the Roaring 20s. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novella, The Old Man and the Sea. A year after being hospitalized for uncontrolled high blood pressure, liver disease, diabetes, and depression, Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho. (Bowker Author Biography) show less