Bigger than life. A complicated icon.

Bigger than life. A complicated icon.
He was an American voice in America's century: bold, exuberant, blustery. He honed his craft at The Kansas City Star. Then he went on to war, to Europe and to become literature's self-made man. He was not always easy to take. Forget perfection, he told a fellow writer. Characters are not symbols. "Keep them people, people, people."
In other words, all humans are flawed. And redeemable.
Four decades after his death, and near the turn of another century,
Hemingway's simple code still rings loud and true.
--Steve Paul, senior writer and editor

Heretofore unpublished jottings reveal ties to KC

Earl Theisen Archives
Courtesy John F. Kennedy Library

"Kansas City was a strange and wonderful place," Ernest Hemingway once wrote but never published. It was a place where "the food is good," where the people spoke "the purest American" and where, frankly, some years later he found it dull. Hemingway put th ese Kansas City observations on paper about 1932, when he was already one of the most celebrated of American writers. They are being published here for the first time, on the verge of the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth, July 21.

Annotation added to Hemingway history
There is a footnote that must be addressed because it involves a correction. It is the fiction writer's prerogative to change facts, but somewhere in the Hemingway annals a seeming fact became etched in stone and no one noticed it was a mistake.

Two births in 1928 KC: A son and a novel insight
Real life and anxiety echoed from here in one of his greatest novels. As Pauline Hemingway was undergoing a complicated birth, Ernest struggled with the tragic end of A Farewell to Arms.

An earnest young man in his letters home
To examine the letters written by a teen-aged Ernest Hemingway from Kansas City is to encounter pre-Jazz Age moxie committed to paper.

Uncle Tyler: KC connections
Kansas City fascinated the young Ernest Hemingway. But he may never have seen it if not for his uncle, Alfred Tyler Hemingway.

'Papa,' as seen by a son
Patrick Hemingway remembers: letters home from the war, an ugly shotgun, a broken bottle, a quiet train trip.

Review: Hemingway is still True at First Light
Hemingway's last book is neither glorious nor inglorious, but an insight into the man and writer.

Review: Fifth volume completes biography cycle
That Ernest Hemingway could be exasperating has been established. Happily, that's not the entire agenda of Michael Reynolds in Hemingway: The Final Years.
• Biographer to speak in Kansas City

Hanneman's Hemingway just had to be
A Kansas City woman's Hemingway search led to a monumental, scholarly achievement.

Hemingway on the big screen
All but two of Hemingway's novels have been made into movies since the 1930s, some of them more than once.

Motor mouths - Smart and savvy TV writers figure it out: Papa knew best
The Wall Street Journal says people are talking really fast on television.

Susan Beegel: What I like about Hemingway

Susan Whitmore: My problem with Hemingway

How six contemporary writers see Hemingway

A Hemingway timeline: 'Any man's life, told truly, is a novel'

Some Hemingway resources

Ernest Hemingway: A selected bibliography

Star style and rules for writing from Hemingway's era

Events celebrate Hemingway

Centennial symposium set arena for literary bullfighting