When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not
characters. A character is a caricature.
Ernest Hemingway
The
public's acquaintance with the personal life of Ernest Hemingway was perhaps greater
than with any other modern novelist. He was well known as a sportsman and "bon vivant" ... He became a legendary figure, wrote John W. Aldridge, "a kind of twentieth-century Lord Byron; and like Byron, he
had learned to play himself, his own best hero, with superb conviction. He was
Hemingway of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing beside a marlin
he had just landed or a lion he had just shot; he was Tarzan Hemingway,
crouching in the African bush with elephant gun at ready, Bwana Hemingway commanding
his native bearers in terse Swahili; he was War Correspondent Hemingway writing
a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty Fascist shells crashed
through the roof; later on he was Task Force Hemingway swathed in ammunition
belts and defending his post single-handed against fierce German attacks."
