Hemingway, McCarthy, and Our ‘Used Up’ Words

I used to dislike Ernest Hemingway’s style. His iceberg technique, with so much left beneath the surface, seemed cold in contrast to the sonatas of his contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald. In a letter containing advice to the latter author, Hemingway admitted as much. “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket,” Papa wrote. “You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live.”