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twenty-seven. He completed the first draft in eight weeks—really, almost the whole novel was there in that first manic burst. It was as if the world had a new kind of writing on its hands—laconic, ironic, dialogue-driven, painterly in the way of an Impressionist canvas. Only the opening section was badly off in its tone, self-conscious and affected. (“This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins, she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story.”) His new friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, three years older, convinced him to drop those opening pages, and Hemingway quickly did, and after that the pitch of the book was nearly perfect (that is, if you were willing to overlook its casual anti-Semitism), and possibly the extremely grateful author never quite forgave Scott for his critical acuity. Certainly, he would begin condescending to him as a fellow artist almost the minute he was able to—another verifiable fact.
    Fitzgerald had gone out of his way to help bring Hemingway to the prestigious American publishing house of Charles Scribner’s Sons, where he was a star. He’d written to his editor, the esteemed (if not yet quite legendary) Maxwell Perkins: “This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemmingway, who lives in Paris (an American), writes for the transatlantic Review + has a brilliant future.” That was early October 1924, even before Fitzgerald had met Hemingway. (Their first meeting came six months later, early spring 1925, at the Dingo Bar in Montparnasse, right after the publication of
The Great Gatsby
.)
    Soon there would be a new Scribners star edited and soothed by Perkins. You can pick up almost any page of
Sun
today, and at its center, the story of a war-wounded man, seeking to conceal his softness with cynicism, will seem as fresh in its language and feeling as it must have seemed to cognoscenti on both sides of the Atlantic in 1926. “It is awfully easy to be hardboiled about everything in the daytime,” Jake Barnes confesses, “but at night it is another thing.” The famously war-wounded man has been wounded in his genitals. He’s incapable of making love.
    As for the short stories, which Hemingway learned how to do beforethe long-form fiction: it was as if these, too, had sought their own level of near perfection without real apprenticeship. It only felt as if modernism in prose had begun with a young husband and father out of the Midwest—a rube, really, no matter that he’d glimpsed war and suffered wounds—sitting down at a table in La Closerie des Lilas in Paris in August 1924 and finishing a long “fish story” (in two parts) and, in the bargain, creating a new kind of American language. On the surface, nothing seems to be happening in the story. Its setting is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The stream he is fishing, as well as the title of the story, are given the musical-sounding name, “Big Two-Hearted River.” A young man named Nick, who seems vaguely to be troubled, has gone camping alone. He leans over a railroad bridge in a burned-out town and watches trout far down through “the glassy convex surface of the pool.” In a meadow, not far from the glinting river, he makes his camp, slitting off “a bright slab of pine” from a stump and chinking it into tent pegs. He fixes cheesecloth across the “open mouth of the tent.” He crawls in and already there is “something mysterious and homelike.” He climbs out. He places a wire grill over a fire and with his boot forces the four legs down into the ground. Now the beans and spaghetti are warming. They’re “making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface.” “ ‘Chrise,’ Nick said, ‘Geezus Chrise,’ he said happily.” The story is proceeding in such inconsequential fashion,