Shattered Reflections on Hemingway

Geoffrey Smagacz at The European Conservative.

"Then we have Hemingway as pugilist taking on other writers as boxing opponents. Hemingway once wrote: 'I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.' Did he? I don’t think he wrote anything better than Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and never limned a better character than Bazarov the Nihilist. Hemingway also literally knocked down poet Wallace Stevens ..."

For another version, see That Time Wallace Stevens Punched Ernest Hemingway in the Face: Things did not end well for him, by Olivia Rutigliano, Crime Reads.

See Hemingway, The Killers, in Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) volume 2, and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, in Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 60.