Katie, your comment about what is published and what we view as publish-worthy or not publish-worthy sparked this comment:
I was thinking about Gertrude Stein because of the recent blog activity on her and I remembered something that she once said about Hemingway, someone who she mentored about life (though perhaps not so much about writing). I also remembered something that Hemingway once wrote in his memoir/book ‘A Moveable Feast’ about Stein, and I thought I would post both of them to demonstrate how two very well-famed authors, who were very close friends, could view each other’s work as not worthy of publishing (or at least view it as bad or unintelligible or not worthy of the name: literature).
Gertrude Stein once said: “Hemingway, remarks are not literature”. (specifically referring to his stories)
and Hemingway wrote: “…she disliked the drudgery of revision and the obligation to make her writing intelligible… The book [The Making of Americans] began magnificently, went on very well for a long way with great stretches of brilliance and then went on endlessly in repetitions that a more conscientious and less lazy writer would have put in the waste basket. I came to know it very well as I got– forced, perhaps, would be the word– Ford Madox Ford to publish it in the Transatlantic Review serially, knowing that it would outrun the life of the review.
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