From the Archive...
A Letter from Mrs. Hemingway
Upon first reading Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated short story collection In Our Time, Stanley Booth claimed — with characteristic hyperbole — there was no more fiction left to write, and that thereafter only non-fiction was available for aspiring authors.
While matriculating at Memphis State University in the early 1960s, Stanley wrote an essay on Hemingway’s overshadowing influence for a campus literary magazine, dedicating the piece to his friend Danny Freeman, dying of cancer, aged twenty-three.
“I do not know whether we can accept Hemingway’s challenge,” Stanley’s essay declaimed, “I do not know if we are strong enough to live up to Hemingway’s example. But if we fail, I wonder how we can stand to live at all, how we can bear our shame; for even a dead Hemingway shames us with the truth that a writer cannot be a coward.”
Stanley sent a copy of “The Challenge of Ernest Hemingway” to Mary Hemingway, the writer’s widow, who responded by letter shortly thereafter.
Stanley Booth is the author of The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, as well as Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South. His work has appeared in Esquire, Playboy, Newsweek, Granta, The Saturday Evening Post, and Rolling Stone. His latest collection, Red Hot and Blue: Fifty Years of Writing About Music, Memphis, and Motherf**kers was published by Chicago Review Press in May 2019.
He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.
