Ernest Hemingway, ca. 1939. Photograph by Lloyd Arnold, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, to mark the occasion of the hundred-year anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, we’ve unlocked the writer’s Art of Fiction interview from issue no. 18 (Spring 1958).  

“The Sun Also Rises I started in Valencia on my birthday, July 21,” Ernest Hemingway told George Plimpton in his Art of Fiction interview, published in issue no. 18 of the Review. “Everybody my age had written a novel and I was still having a difficult time writing a paragraph.”

This past Thursday, October 22, marked the hundred-year anniversary of The Sun Also Rises—the first draft of which, the writer revealed to Plimpton, he completed in only six weeks. “I showed the first draft to Nathan Asch, the novelist, who then had quite a strong accent,” says Hemingway. “He said, ‘Hem, vaht do you mean saying you wrote a novel? A novel huh.’ ”

One hundred years after the publication of The Sun Also Rises, the Review no longer phoneticizes as Plimpton did here—but other things have stuck around, like Hemingway’s interview, which we’ve unlocked this week to mark the occasion of the centennial.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 21
Ernest Hemingway

INTERVIEWER

How about financial security? Can that be a detriment to good writing?

HEMINGWAY

If it came early enough and you loved life as much as you loved your work it would take much character to resist the temptations. Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it keeps you from worrying. Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.

From issue no. 18 (Spring 1958)

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Hazel Byers is the Review’s engagement editor.