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
