By-Line: Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway kept journalism at arm's length in theory — a writer, he warned, could be ruined by it after the learning years — and practiced it his whole life. Editor William White's selection catches every phase: the Star apprentice filing Paris color pieces and covering the Genoa and Lausanne conferences; the Esquire celebrity of the thirties, writing 'letters' on marlin, lions, and the coming world war with terrifying prescience ('Notes on the Next War' called the date nearly to the year); the NANA correspondent in Spain filing under fire; the middle-aged war correspondent attaching himself to the 22nd Infantry from Normandy into Germany — and, in the famous telling, liberating the Ritz bar ahead of the army.

The collection's fascination is watching the two crafts feed each other: dispatches that became stories nearly verbatim, reportage rehearsing the fiction's scenes years early, and everywhere the style being invented on deadline. The Paris pieces alone — cafés, poseurs, trout streams, currency arbitrage for Canadians — are a young expatriate's guidebook to exactly the world we map. For readers who know only the novels, By-Line is the workshop with the doors open.

Four movements, chronological. The Star years, 1920–24: Paris vignettes, European conference politics, the Greco-Turkish war's refugee columns — the material In Our Time compressed. The Esquire years, 1933–36: fishing, hunting, literary opinions, and the war predictions. Spain, 1937–38: Madrid, the Ebro, the retreats, filed for the wire services. The Second War, 1944–45: the Channel crossing, Normandy, the liberation of Paris, the Hürtgen Forest's meat grinder — plus late miscellany, including the account of the two African plane crashes he read his own obituaries after.

Dip anywhere; the young Paris pieces and the 1944–45 run are the essential stretches.