The Only Thing That Counts

Perkins of Scribner — Fitzgerald's editor, Wolfe's wrangler — landed Hemingway in 1926 after the Torrents of Spring maneuver, and the file that follows is the spine of this shelf's Hemingway wing: The Sun Also Rises argued word by word (which profanities survive, which shock is essential), A Farewell to Arms serialized and defended, the story collections assembled, For Whom the Bell Tolls steered to its triumph — every book a paper trail of proposals, protests, and settlements between a combative author and an editor whose steadiness was its own genius.

Bruccoli and Trogdon print both sides in full, which is the volume's advantage over any selection: the negotiation as drama, with Perkins's tact answering Hemingway's weather. It is also, by the end, unexpectedly moving — twenty-two years closing with Perkins's sudden death in 1947 and Hemingway's grief for the man he trusted most in publishing. The scholarly letters edition cites this book as a standard source; readers can take it simply as the best sustained view of how the masterpieces actually got made and sold.

The correspondence complete, 1925–1947, both directions: the recruitment; the Sun Also Rises and Farewell to Arms files with their obscenity diplomacy; advances, royalties, and the Depression's arithmetic; the war years and For Whom the Bell Tolls; and the late letters before Perkins's death — annotated throughout, with the business of literature and the friendship inside it equally visible.

Pairs perfectly with the books themselves: read a novel's file here after the novel, and watch it get born.