In 1934, a young man named Arnold Samuelson was fresh out of journalism school at the University of Minnesota when he read “One Way Across,” a short story by Ernest Hemingway.
The story later became part of Hemingway’s fourth novel “To Have and Have Not.”
Samuelson admired the story so much that he travelled from Minnesota to Florida to meet Hemingway and ask him for writing advice.
As chronicled in a 1935 article published in Esquire, “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter,” (which you can read in full on the website of screenwriter Diane Drake) Hemingway told the young writer he should only compare himself to the great dead writers, not contemporary ones.
He then gave Samuelson a list of books to read, detailed in Samuelson’s memoir “With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba.” Open Culture — which offers free digital copies of most of the texts — collected the list, which can be found below.
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