Inside Hemingway’s Surprising Letter to Fitzgerald: A Stark Revelation About Battling Self-Doubt

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Yet their friendship was certainly not solely characterized by mutual encouragement. Instead, it was marked by a terse rivalry tinged with both collaboration and insecurity.

The pair often sent each other strongly worded letters that mixed praise and criticism. In response to a draft of The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald penned a 10-page letter that called parts of the book “careless” and “ineffectual.” His advice led Hemingway to make significant changes to the manuscript.

The pair were also extremely different; Fitzgerald struggled to handle his liquor, summered on the French Riviera, and often acted wealthier than he was. Meanwhile, Hemingway generally maintained control no matter how much he drank, enjoyed watching bullfights in Spain, and purposefully lived far below his means. These differences are easy to track in their writing, with Fitzgerald’s lavish, flowery prose presenting a stark contrast to Hemingway’s sparse and fastidious style. 

Meanwhile, Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda and Hemingway famously loathed each other; at one point, Zelda accused Hemingway and her husband of being lovers, while Hemingway often expressed his belief that Zelda was holding Fitzgerald’s writing back. By the end of the 1920s, their friendship had disintegrated as Hemingway grew exasperated with what he saw as Fitzgerald’s excess of self-pity and mishandling of his own potential, a frustration he expressed in the letter below. 

Fitzgerald would unfortunately continue down a path of tragedy. Unfortunately, Hemingway’s own demons eventually caught up to him, too; prone to alcoholism and depression, he committed suicide in 1961 at the age of 61. It’s not hard to imagine that, in part, Hemingway’s letter of advice may have been indirectly penned to a deeply buried part of himself.

Read the entirety of Hemingway’s letter to Fitzgerald below.

Hemingway’s Complete 1934 Letter to Fitzgerald

Key West
28 May 1934

Dear Scott:

I liked it and I didn’t. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald (goddamn it Dos took it with him so I can’t refer to it. So if I make any mistakes—). Then you started fooling with them, making them come from things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that, Scott. If you take real people and write about them you cannot give them other parents than they have (they are made by their parents and what happens to them) you cannot make them do anything they would not do. You can take you or me or Zelda or Pauline or Hadley or Sara or Gerald but you have to keep them the same and you can only make them do what they would do. You can’t make one be another. Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples’ pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvellously faked case histories. You, who can write better than anybody can, who are so lousy with talent that you have to—the hell with it. Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises. You could write a fine book about Gerald and Sara for instance if you knew enough about them and they would not have any feeling, except passing, if it were true.

There were wonderful places and nobody else nor none of the boys can write a good one half as good reading as one that doesn’t come out by you, but you cheated too damned much in this one. And you don’t need to.

In the first place I’ve always claimed that you can’t think. All right, we’ll admit you can think. But say you couldn’t think; then you ought to write, invent, out of what you know and keep the people’s antecedants straight. Second place, a long time ago you stopped listening except to the answers to your own questions. You had good stuff in too that it didn’t need. That’s what dries a writer up (we all dry up. That’s no insult to you in person) not listening. That is where it all comes from. Seeing, listening. You see well enough. But you stop listening.

It’s a lot better than I say. But it’s not as good as you can do.

You can study Clausewitz in the field and economics and psychology and nothing else will do you any bloody good once you are writing. We are like lousy damned acrobats but we make some mighty fine jumps, bo, and they have all these other acrobats that won’t jump.

For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of s**t. I try to put the s**t in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live. All write but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material (as we say at Yale). You can’t think well enough to sit down and write a deliberate masterpiece and if you could get rid of Seldes and those guys that nearly ruined you and turn them out as well as you can and let the spectators yell when it is good and hoot when it is not you would be all right.