The Editor Who Drove Hemingway Away

You may have experienced a boss who’s so intolerable, so insufferable, and so tyrannical that no other option remained but to turn in your badge or name tag and walk away forever. This is exactly what happened to American writer Ernest Hemingway. Before he was the Ernest Hemingway and collected a Nobel Prize in Literature and international recognition for his fiction-writing, his greatest nemesis wasn’t a literary critic, a tabloid reporter out to slander him, or even the FBI suspecting him of being an overseas spy agent. It was the editor of the Toronto Daily Star, Harry C. Hindmarsh.

Although Hemingway had been somewhat happily employed by the Toronto Star Weekly as a foreign correspondent since 1921, in 1923 he was unhappily transferred to feature writing for the Toronto Daily Star under the notorious Hindmarsh. Hindmarsh, personality-wise, was a battle-axe. Rather than tenderly nurture the talents of his best and most profitable writers, as many editors have been known to do, Hindmarsh’s tactic was to chop off an author’s pride at the neck, lest they dare to consider themselves too important and too indispensable to the paper. Hemingway, according to literary biographer Scott Donaldson, quickly become the target of a confidence-bruising onslaught designed to humble him and mold him into a subservient, obedient journalist.

“Hindmarsh, who was married to the daughter of the Star’s publisher, was determined to rid the paper of any potential prime donne,” Donaldson writes. When Hemingway returned to in-office work after his European sojourn, Hindmarsh

immediately decided that Hemingway needed his ego punctured and gave his new staffer a series of piddling assignments. He [Hemingway] was awakened in the middle of the night to cover one-alarm fires. “Go over to city hall,” he was told, “and see what’s going on.” For two weeks after he went on the payroll on September 10, nothing that Hemingway wrote was deemed worthy of a byline in the Daily Star, a paper not at all stingy about bylines. Meanwhile, Hindmarsh was trying to convert his feature writer into an investigative reporter and Hemingway was busy with his homework.

Hindmarsh also developed a habit of pushing Hemingway into trains to chase vague stories all over Ontario. Hemingway even missed the birth of his first son, John “Jack” Hemingway, at a Toronto hospital because Hindmarsh had demanded that he travel to New York to cover the arrival of British Prime Minister Lloyd George. Hemingway, as anyone would, snapped under the bullying and quit in January 1924.

“If the assistant managing editor had set out to make Hemingway miserable, he could hardly have succeeded more effectively,” writes Donaldson.

Hemingway periodically returned to journalistic writing throughout his life, but he never associated with the Star again (Hindmarsh went on to become managing editor and then president of the paper). And though Hemingway had already been working on what he considered his “serious” writing on the side, Hindmarsh could almost be credited with really jump-starting Hemingway’s outstanding career by driving him from the newspaper industry.

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