It’s Ultimately This That They Judge You On

There’s no question Hemingway was a great writer. He was the voice of a generation—The Lost Generation. He redefined prose style in the English language. His books have sold millions of copies. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He wrote beautifully on love and family (A Farewell to Arms). He wrote beautifully on struggle and perseverance (The Old Man and the Sea). He was also a pretty awful husband and father. As one of his sons said, to Hemingway “family life [was] the enemy of accomplishment.” It was a thing that interfered with his greatness, his craft, his books. “On several occasions,” Patrick Hemingway recounted that Hemingway “said being a a good husband, being a good father…all of [these things were] not recognized by a reviewer when he reviewed his book.”

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