The Hemingway List: Ernest Hemingway’s essential reading list
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In the spring of 1934, Arnold Samuelson hitchhiked and took a freight train and made it to Key West, Florida. He was inspired by one of Ernest Hemingway‘s short stories to travel and meet the author to have the chance to talk about writing for a few minutes.
Hemingway, on the other hand, astounded the young man by employing him and giving him a place to stay on his new boat Pilar. For a year, Samuelson lived with the Hemingway, visiting Cuba for the marlin fishing season and absorbing everything he could about writing and life.
Samuelson recorded his unique experience and its many lessons in a book that his daughter discovered after he died in 1981. It was published a few years later as With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba.
As both men discussed life, experience, and writing, Hemingway gave Samuelson “a list of books any writer should have read as a part of his education.” Since then, this list has become known as The Hemingway List.
It’s not the only time Hemingway gave a reading list, and there have been a few variations each time, adding titles to the list of Hemingway’s recommended readings.
The Hemingway List (1934)
Before giving him this list, Hemingway also told him to read Huckleberry Finn (1884) again, as “It’s the best book an American ever wrote, up to the place where Huck finds the nigger after he’s been stolen. It marks the beginning of American literature.”
– The Blue Hotel (1898) by Stephen Crane
– The Open Boat (1897) by Stephen Crane
– Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert
– Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce
– The Red and the Black (1830) Stendhal
– Of Human Bondage (1915) by W. Somerset Maugham
– Anna Karenina (1877) by Leo Tolstoy
– War and Peace (1867) by Leo Tolstoy
– Buddenbrooks (1901) by Thomas Mann
– Hail and Farewell (1911) by George Moore
– The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
– The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900)
– The Enormous Room (1922) by E.E. Cummings
– Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
– Far Away and Long Ago (1918) by W.H. Hudson
– The American (1877) by Henry James
The Esquire List (1935)
On February 1935, Ernest Hemingway published an article in the magazine Esquire, in which he gave a list of “the best of the best books”. This selection contains a few different titles from the previous one:
– Anna Karenina (1877) by Leo Tolstoy
– Far Away and Long Ago (1918) by W.H. Hudson
– Buddenbrooks (1901) by Thomas Mann
– Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
– Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert
– War and Peace (1867) by Leo Tolstoy
– A Sportman’s Sketches (1852) by Ivan Turgenev
– The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
– Hail and Farewell (1911) by George Moore
– Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain
– Winesburg, Ohio (1919) by Sherwood Anderson
– La Reine Margot (1845) by Alexandre Dumas
– La Maison Tellier (1881) by Guy de Maupassant
– The Red and the Black (1830) Stendhal
– The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) by Stendhal
– Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce
– Autobiographies (1926) by W.B. Yeats
Still for the Esquire, in October 1935, Ernest Hemingway wrote about Arnold Samuelson knocking at his door in the article Monologue to the Maestro and what book he should have read. Some new titles appear:
– Buddenbrooks (1901) by Thomas Mann
– Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce
– Portrait of the Artist (1916) by James Joyce
– Ulysses (1920) by James Joyce
– Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding
– Joseph Andrews (1742) by Henry Fielding
– The Red and the Black (1830) Stendhal
– The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) by Stendhal
– The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and any two other Dostoyevskis
– Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain
– The Open Boat (1897) by Stephen Crane
– The Blue Hotel (1898) by Stephen Crane
– Hail and Farewell (1911) by George Moore
– Autobiographies (1926) by W.B. Yeats
– all the good De Maupassant, all the good Kipling, all of Turgenieff
– Far Away and Long Ago (1918) by W.H. Hudson
– Henry James’ short stories especially Madame de Mauves (1874) and The Turn of the Screw (1898)
– The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James
– The American (1877) by Henry James
On his bookshelf (1958)
In 1958, The Paris Review published an interview with Ernest Hemingway. At some point, George Plimpton, editor of the magazine, offers a listing of the books forming the pile on the shelf “opposite Hemingway’s knee as he stands up to his “work-desk”. It contained:
– The Common Reader (1925) by Virginia Woolf
– House Divided (1947) by Ben Ames Williams
– The Partisan Reader
– The Republic (1943) by Charles A. Beard
– Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia (1942) by Tarle Eugene
– How Young You Look (1941) by Peggy Wood
– Will Shakespeare and the Dyer’s Hand (1943) by Alden Brooks
– African Hunting (1863) by William Charles Baldwin
– Collected Poems (1935) by T. S. Eliot
– and two books on General Custer’s fall at the battle of the Little Big Horn.
Note: The Esquire List couldn’t have been possible without the article on Mirjam Donath’s website.