McMurtry on Hemingway

"Hemingway's reputation is now so encrusted with a seventy-five-year accumulation of biographical lore--most of it unfavorable to him--that it is easy to forget how well he wrote at the beginning of his career. Picasso said somewhere that no one had looked at Matisse as hard as he had. Hemingway, as a young man, had the same ability to look hard, as hard as a painter, at a place and at the often destructive human emotions operating within a place that was seemingly as lovely as northern Michigan."
~~ from Roads by Larry McMurtry