List No. 101

BOOKS YOU OUGHT TO READ

Ernest Hemingway

1935

In the spring of 1934, a 22-year-old aspiring novelist named Arnold Samuelson hitch-hiked from Minnesota to Key West, Florida to meet his idol, Ernest Hemingway. Hoping at best to spend ten minutes in the company of the “greatest writer alive”, Samuelson was quickly stunned to instead be taken under the author’s wing and spent the best part of the next year as Hemingway’s deckhand aboard his boat, Pilar. It was on that first day that Hemingway offered his first piece of advice to his young visitor: upon learning that he was yet to read War and Peace, Hemingway said, “That’s a damned good book. You ought to read it. We’ll go up to my workshop and I’ll make out a list you ought to read.”

Stephen Crane –

The Blue Hotel

The Open Boat.

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

Dubliners – James Joyce –

The Red and The Black – By Stendhal –

(OF Human Bondage – Somerset Maugham) –

Anna Karenina – Tolstoy –

War and Peace – Tolstoy –

Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann –

Hail and Farewell – George Moore –

Brothers Karamazov – Doestoevsky –

Oxford Book of English Verse –

The Enormous Room – EE Cummings.

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

Far Away and Long Ago – W.H. Hudson –

The American – Henry James.