Reviews for Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner

The average rating for Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-03 00:00:00 Mindy Nancarrow Hard to say exactly what I was expecting from this book but it was, in a word, more. I ended up skimming Hemingway's letters only. Surprisingly, very little of this correspondence struck me as remotely interesting. Sixty-year-old literary gossip, and Hemingway's obsessions with health, money, fishing, and bullfighting don't actually add up to much. Above all, one is convinced Hemingway had a very good reason for wanting his correspondence destroyed. Meanwhile, the posthumous, barely-hinted-at feud between Hotchner and Mary Hemingway over the publication of these documents is likely a much more interesting story than the letters themselves manage to tell.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-10 00:00:00 Jason Jankowski Poetry is by its nature elevated language. No matter how we try to drag it down to earth with flarf or cutups, Dada Bestiality or computer-generated randomness, by framing it with a page we exalt, indeed capture the choices we've made. And this is what I love about the vanishing art of letter writing. The same choices are made but it's casual and personal--at least in a close relationship. Out of all the beat poets, Ginsberg and Snyder were perhaps the best known and the most politically active. Indeed, these concerns are often expressed in their epistles. Snyder book the Back Country was the first book of poems I dived into, and I consider Howl as perhaps the greatest single poem of the post-war years, so I have my biases, but most of all I just enjoy the personal touch, the directness and groundedness of these letters.