A TIP OF THE HAT TO HEMINGWAY ON HIS BIRTHDAY

Today, July 21, is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway. A man once rightfully thought a great writer but now well out of favor because of the ideological observation that he did not treat women correctly, either in his fiction or his life.
Joan Didion, in a recent reprint of a masterful 1998 essay (thanks to great friend John Wilson for passing it on), points out that he changed the way fiction was written—for the better—and offers a lucid account of how he did so in a brilliant analysis of the opening ...