Ernest Hemingway, Kansas City Star Reporter: 'The Best Rules I Ever Learned For The Business Of Writing'

Jim Fisher, a columnist for the Kansas City Star, offers a piece on the Star's most famous reporter, Ernest Hemingway.

In 1915, the sinking of the Lusitania received exceptional play in The Kansas City Star. A two-column headline announced the tragedy, the first of many in the next few years. The European powers plunged deeper into war, drawing the United States inexorably toward the trenches, which already snaked across the fields of eastern France.

Yet the war, in its first years, seemed distant in Kansas City. The Star supplied readers twice a day with details of the expanding conflict, but, on the whole, it still emphasized local news. Reporters, as they would for the next 60 years, bent over their typewriters, which then were attached to oaken tables in the cavernous city room. The staff rotated as The Star finished its run and the night staff of “The Morning Kansas City Star,” The Times, came to work. Almost to a man, the reporters wore caps and hats. Celluloid collars pinched their necks.

But change was in the air. And into the midst of The Star staff, in late 1917, came a youth who, when he could get away with it, wore a red and black checkered hunting shirt to work. Old timers frowned on such dress. But the young reporter worked outside the office most of the time. His name was Ernest Hemingway.

Years later scholars would come to Kansas City to investigate Hemingway’s tenure at The Star, which lasted from October 1917 to April 1918. This period fascinated Hemingway students because his lean, spare writing style, basically “Star Style,” led him to become one of the most acclaimed writers of the 20th century, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature and a legend as a man, warrior, womanizer and drinker.

You can read therest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article10632716.html

Today In Media History: In 1954, A Former Journalist Named Ernest Hemingway Received The Nobel Prize For Literature

David Shedden at the journalism web site poynter.org offers a look back at author and journalist Ernest Hemingway, who received the Nobel Prize for literature on October 28, 1954.

Ernest Hemingway was a reporter for the Kansas City Star from October 1917 to April 1918.

In 1999, the newspaper’s website created a special section in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth. This included old stories, various links, anecdotes, and a story titled, “Of ‘Star Style’ and a reporter named Hemingway.”

“And into the midst of The Star staff, in late 1917, came a youth who, when he could get away with it, wore a red and black checkered hunting shirt to work. Old timers frowned on such dress. But the young reporter worked outside the office most of the time. His name was Ernest Hemingway.

….Ernest Hemingway came to The Star as a big, round-faced boy of 18 with limitless energy, and a desire to be in the thick of the action whether a shooting scrape or chasing ambulances. Hemingway worked at the paper for seven months. In late April 1918, he and Ted Brumback, another Star reporter, joined an ambulance unit in Italy.”

“After returning from World War I, Ernest Hemingway moved to Toronto and began writing for the Toronto Star. He worked there from 1920 to 1924 and some 70 of his articles have been archived online in an attractive new website, the Hemingway Papers. At first Hemingway was a stringer and later he wrote as a staff writer, under the byline Ernest M. Hemingway.

….He went on to write for the Star about boxing and trout fishing and organized crime in Chicago. By 1922 Hemingway had moved to Paris with his wife and sent dispatches that anticipated the themes of the novels that would make him famous.”
   
You can read the rest of the piece, hear Hemingway's Nobel Prize acceptence speech and watch videos about Hemingway via the below link:

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/277183/today-in-media-history-in-1954-a-former-journalist-named-ernest-hemingway-received-the-nobel-prize-for-literature/

Hemingway's Early Letters Challenge Myths

Linda Patterson Miller, the Penn State 2011-2012 laureate, offers her view of Hemingway as a young letter writer.

Hemingway did not become an established writer until after 1922 (he was still essentially unpublished except for his newspaper pieces), but his early letters reveal that he was very much aware of himself as a writer in the making. After working as a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star for six months, Hemingway wrote his father on April 16, 1918, to express his understanding that professional newspaper writing demanded immediacy and precision, along with endurance. He was “bushed! . . . mentally and physically,” he told his father, from months of “[h]aving to write a half column story with every name, address and initial verified and remembering to use good style, perfect style in fact, and get all the facts and in the correct order, make it have snap and wallop” and “see it all in your mind’s eye,” while “a boy snatches the pages from your machine as fast as you write them.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://live.psu.edu/story/58435

You can also read more about Hemingway's early letters via the below link:

http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com/2011/11/early-letters-of-ernest-hemingway.html

Scholar Unravels The Story Behind 'The Father of American Literature' Mark Twain

Allen Pierleoni wrote an interesting piece that appeared in the Kansas City Star about Robert H. Hirst and the late, great author and humorist Mark Twain.

It seems there's nothing Robert H. Hirst doesn't know about humorist Mark Twain, aka "the father of American literature."

A bold statement, but true. Hirst is among the world's pre-eminent Twain scholars. As such, he is the editor-in-charge and curator of the Mark Twain Papers and Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

It was Hirst who led his team of editors in sorting through and annotating Twain's 5,000-page manuscript that is the basis of last year's best-selling "The Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1" (University of California Press, $34.95, 736 pages).

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/09/28/3172296/scholar-unravels-the-story-behind.html