SOURCE: Kazin, Alfred. “The Battler.” New York Review of Books 28, no. 6 (16 April 1981): 3-4.

In the following review, Kazin maintains that Hemingway's selected letters “make a sometimes unbearably continuous and too emphatic record of the man's life, vehemence by vehemence.”

Hemingway liked to write letters; his biographer Carlos Baker, selecting nearly six hundred here [in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961], thinks he wrote six or seven thousand in the fifty years preceding his death in 1961. He liked to write, scoffed at Conrad and others for grumbling. Since Hemingway's “real writing” came so hard (he counted each day's words like a prospector weighing his find) and was above all intended to look hard, it is obvious from these more than nine hundred pages of letters that letters were play, relaxation, a chance to warm up before the day's stint and to cool down after it. With his usual devastating shrewdness...