SOURCE: Hart, Jeffrey. “Swell Letters: The (Mostly) Sunlit Hemingway.” National Review 33, no. 10 (29 May 1981): 618-19.

In the following positive assessment of the selected letters, Hart claims that “the true Hemingway devotee will savor every word, and every brief explanatory footnote by Carlos Baker, who has done a superb editorial job here.”

Malcolm Cowley once wrote that Ernest Hemingway was one of the “nocturnal” American writers, and compared him with Hawthorne. I myself have compared him to Picasso's famous painting of the woman looking in the mirror: one countenance is painted in warm colors, cheerful; the alternative countenance is greenish and sickly. This second countenance is at the center of Hemingway's fiction, preoccupied with madness and death, terrifying emotions controlled by the famous style. The many letters collected in this volume represent almost entirely the other countenance, the sunlit Hemingway—though, here and there, the essential nightmare peeps through.

This...