The authors included in Ernest Hemingway’s personal library
The legendary Ernest Hemingway once proclaimed that all good books were alike “in that they are truer than if they had really happened”.
Hemingway always thought that after reading, you’d feel changed, that every plot point now belonged to you: “The good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was,” he said. Hemingway himself was capable of imbuing works like The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises with the same emotional force, earning him a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
As all writers are, Hemingway was a voracious reader, known to flit between the pages of ten books at a time. In between writing his own material and reading multiple novels at a time, he somehow also found time to subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Fans of his straightforward prose often wondered what words inspired his directness.
His sister, Marcelline, once shared that reading was incredibly important growing up. Classics from Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, and William Thackeray line the family library. Marcelline suffered mumps one spring, and by the time she recovered, she’d read every book cover to cover. Her brother suffered the same right after her and copied her method of coping. One of his most popular quotes is: “There is no friend as loyal as a book,” and in the summer he spent sick in a library, that definitely rang true.
“We both devoured [Robert Louis] Stevenson, especially one of his lesser-known volumes, The Suicide Club, as well as Treasure Island,” Marcelline once wrote. “Thackeray wasn’t as easy reading as Kipling or Stevenson or Dickens, but the green cloth volume of Vanity Fair we read from cover to cover. We both read Horatio Alger books in third and fourth grade, and Ernest took them seriously.”
As he grew older and literary fame followed, Hemingway continued to revisit classic novels, needing a nuanced understanding of what he felt he had to beat. He often doled out advice to other writers intent on doing the same, guiding them to the work of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.
“Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it,” he’d advise. “Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.” At the same time, he seemed to shy away from instructing people to take writing tips from books, imploring them to just sit with the emotional experience they created. To Hemingway, books were always the most crucial guide to writing because they allowed him to “see, to hear, to think, to feel and not feel, and to write.”
Ernest Hemingway’s personal library:
- Virginia Woolf
- Ben Ames Williams
- Charles Beard
- Eugene Tarle
- Peggy Wood
- William Charles Baldwin
- T.S. Eliot
- James Joyce
- Shakespeare
- Stephen Crane
- Gustave Flaubert
- Stendahl
- W. Somerset Maugham
- Leo Tolstoy
- Thomas Mann
- George Moore
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- E.E. Cummings
- Emily Bronte
- W. H. Hudson
- Henry James
- Frederick Marryat
- Rudyard Kipling
- Henry Fielding
- Mark Twain
- W. B. Yeats
- Ivan Turgenev
- Sherwood Anderson
- Alexandre Dumas
- Marcel Proust