🖋️Hemingway's reading list for a young writer (1934)

What he told Arnold Samuelson to read in Key West, reproduced in With Hemingway. Start here if you want the syllabus version of literary fiction.

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"The Blue Hotel" - Stephen Crane

start here, it's a short story not a commitment

"The Open Boat" - Stephen Crane

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Dubliners - James Joyce

no lore exam required, these stand alone

The Red and the Black - Stendhal

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

eats a whole month of your reading life, budget for it

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann

Hail and Farewell - George Moore

nobody's read this one, hardest to find a decent edition of

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Oxford Book of English Verse

the anthology, not a single poet. dip in and out

The Enormous Room - E.E. Cummings

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Far Away and Long Ago - W.H. Hudson

his memoir, not fiction. easy to skip and I get why people do

The American - Henry James

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