Sunday, September 20, 2020

What if Ernest Hemingway was Typecast?

 
Ernest Hemingway wrote a lot of stories about horse racing and during his early years in Paris much of his time was spent at race tracks or studying the racing forum looking for a good horse to bet. This side of Hemingway is not widely known mainly because almost all of his stories about horse racing were lost when his wife Hadley had a briefcase full of Hemingway's original works along with the carbon copies stolen off a train.

I keep wondering what would have happened if those stories had not been lost to history. Would Hemingway the writer have turned out very different?

Imagine if some of those horse racing stories were published and they were met with some acclaim. Would Hemingway have been known as the renown horse racing writer?  If Hemingway branched out to other subjects would the critics have told him to stick to horse racing? "Hemingway writes about an old fisherman struggling to land a giant marlin and the story is surprisingly well told coming from a writer who normally covers steeple chase."

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