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WORK TITLE: Hemingway at Eighteen
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1953
WEBSITE: https://www.stevepaulkc.com/
CITY: Kansas City
STATE: MO
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1953.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Worked formerly for Kansas City Star for over forty years as book critic, arts editor, restaurant critic, and editorial page editor.
AVOCATIONS:Photography.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Steve Paul is a Kansas City-based writer and editor. He worked for the Kansas City Star for over four decades. While at the Star, he covered local news and politics, as well as culture, crime and food. He has been a book critic, arts editor, restaurant critic, and editorial page editor. Paul retired from the Star in 2016 to focus on books, writing projects, and photography.
Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year that Launched an American Legend is Paul’s third book. The entirety of the book focuses on Hemingway’s eighteenth year, emphasizing the significance of this year in directing the writer’s life and career path. The idea to write the book was inspired by a lucky discovery Paul made at Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. He found a letter from T. Norman “Tubby” Williams, a writer at the Kansas City Star who had been hired at the paper in 1917, just after eighteen-year-old Hemingway had begun writing for publication. In the letter Williams praises Hemingway’s talent, stating that he would give a million dollars for the teen’s talent. Paul viewed the letter as proof that Hemingway’s talents developed early, and that his early life was worthy of investigation.
Eighteen is the year Hemingway began writing for publications, starting with his $15-a-week job as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. Following high school graduation, Hemingway decided against attending college. His uncle was acquaintances with the Star‘s chief editorial writer, and was able to get Hemingway a job through this connection. Hemingway was given entry-level assignments, but he threw himself fully into the stories. He displayed the ability to write succinct, vivid pieces about gritty topics. He came to learn that Kansas City had an underbelly of violence and corruption, and many of his stories focused on somber subjects. Hemingway covered crime and obituaries, and was even barred from a hospital for exposing mismanagement. Paul notes that it was during this time that Hemingway began to develop his unique writing style so notable in his later fiction. The content of some of Hemingway’s fiction stories can be traced back to events he covered while working at the Star.
Hemingway worked at the Star for six and a half months before enlisting in the ambulance service for World War I. He had been rejected by the U.S. Army due to his poor eyesight, but he was eligible to work in the ambulance division. He was stationed in Italy, where he witnessed the horrors of war, which would later influence his fiction writing. Two weeks before his nineteenth birthday, he was seriously injured by a mortar shell in a trench. An Italian fighter standing next to him was also hit by the mortar shell, and died instantly. The injury took Hemingway out of the frontline of war and back home.
Paul faced difficulties in researching the book, as it was uncommon for newspapers to by-line stories during Hemingway’s time, and Hemingway rarely mentioned the specifics of the stories he was writing in letters he wrote home. Paul used Hemingway’s letters and a keen eye to discern which pieces were penned by the famed writer. Paul also researched the book by visiting key locations that influenced Hemingway’s development as a writer, including the site where he was wounded during the war.
Brendan Driscoll in Booklist wrote, “teens may appreciate Hemingway’s coming-of-age; aspiring writers may find encouragement in a great writer’s youthful imperfections.” Describing author Steve Paul, Dean Jobb in Chicago Review of Books wrote, he “is perfectly suited to dig deeper to Hemingway’s beginnings” adding, “Paul has done admirable detective work.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a clear, concise, sympathetic account of a gifted young man discovering who he is–and what he can do.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2017, Brendan Driscoll, review of Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend, p. 30.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2017, review of Hemingway at Eighteen.
ONLINE
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (October 10, 2017), Dean Jobb, review of Hemingway at Eighteen.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com/ (November 18, 2017), Harper Barnes, review of Hemingway at Eighteen.
Washington Times Online, https://www.washingtontimes.com/ (February 27, 2018), Paul Davis, review of Hemingway at Eighteen.
Steve Paul is an award-winning writer and editor who worked at the Kansas City Star for more than 40 years, including stints as book critic, arts editor, restaurant critic, and—before his retirement in early 2016—editorial page editor. He is a former board member of the National Book Critics Circle and the author (and photographer) of Architecture A to Z, the editor of Kansas City Noir, and coeditor of War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway's Early Life and Writings.
Steve Paul is an award-winning writer and editor who worked at the Kansas City Star for more than 40 years, including stints as book critic, arts editor, restaurant critic, and—before his retirement in early 2016—editorial page editor. He is a former board member of the National Book Critics Circle and the author (and photographer) of Architecture A to Z, the editor of Kansas City Noir, and coeditor of War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings.
Steve Paul has been a writer and editor based in Kansas City for more than four decades. His long newspaper career ran a gamut from local news and politics, to long-form features on culture, crime and food, to extended stints as book review editor, architecture writer, and editorial page editor. He retired in 2016 in order to focus on books, other writing projects, photography and more. He's the editor of Kansas City Noir, an anthology of contemporary short fiction (Akashic Books); co-editor of War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway's Early Life and Writings (Kent State University Press); and in October 2017 his book Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend will be published by Chicago Review Press.
Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend
Brendan Driscoll
Booklist. 114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p30.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend. By Steve Paul. Oct. 2017. 278p. illus. Chicago Review, $26.99 (97816137397161.813.52.
Having decided against college, 18-year-old Hemingway landed a job with the Kansas City Star. Thrown entry-level assignments on gritty topics, he throws himself into his work, punching out compact, vivid sentences that comport with the paper's writing guide and also hint at the trademark fiction style he would later cultivate. But the Great War was calling, and before his nineteenth birthday Hemingway was serving with the Red Cross on the Italian front, where he would be seriously wounded in a mortar attack. As a strategy for literary biography, searching the events of early adulthood for clues to the broader trajectory can be risky, yet 1917 was an indisputably momentous year for Hemingway and the world, and it is, indeed, illuminating to consider his time as a journalist as a key bridge between the Oak Park boy and the battle-scarred author. Paul, a veteran of the Kansas City Stars editorial staff, provides generous insight into the paper and the city, and his expert interest in Hemingway parallels his fond appreciation for the newsroom's "clack of typing mills and the smoke of countless cigars."--Brendan Driscoll
YA: Teens may appreciate Hemingway's coming-of-age; aspiring writers may find encouragement in a great writer's youthful imperfections. BD.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Driscoll, Brendan. "Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 30. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161489/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6ab1e3cb. Accessed 15 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161489
Paul, Steve: HEMINGWAY AT EIGHTEEN
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Paul, Steve HEMINGWAY AT EIGHTEEN Chicago Review (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 10, 1 ISBN: 978-1-61373-971-6
Yes, there is more to learn about the man who remains one of America's most iconic writers.Paul, who for decades wrote for the Kansas City Star and, with several others, has co-edited a previous work on Papa (War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway's Early Life and Writings, 2014, etc.), shares some history with Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), who began his professional writing career at age 18 at the Star, where he worked for more than six months before enlisting in the ambulance service for World War I. Paul focuses on this single year, and we learn about how Hemingway acquired the Kansas City gig, where and how he lived in the city, the sorts of stories he covered, his reputation among his colleagues, his decision to apply for the ambulance service (he failed the military physical), his journey to Europe, and his severe wounding in Italy--an experience that would lead, as the author points out, to A Farewell to Arms. Paul notes that during Hemingway's tenure at the paper, there were no bylines, but he occasionally sent home clippings, and Paul mined the young man's letters as well to pin other pieces to the novice writer. He also points out the connections between the Kansas City stories he covered and his fiction (as Paul does as well with the ambulance service). The author, like previous biographers, whom he generously mentions, struggles to separate fact from fiction in the life of Hemingway, who could be a fabulist. Paul also traveled to key sites, including the spot where Hemingway was wounded, to enrich his account. He says several times that Hemingway learned to write in Kansas City--a genial exaggeration, of course. Near the end, he reveals a key discovery about Papa and a grand jury. A clear, concise, sympathetic account of a gifted young man discovering who he is--and what he can do.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Paul, Steve: HEMINGWAY AT EIGHTEEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572643/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bd29c12b. Accessed 15 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572643
You’ve Never Seen Ernest Hemingway Like This Before
BY DEAN JOBB
OCTOBER 10, 2017
9781613739716_46107Steve Paul’s “eureka” moment during his research into the young Ernest Hemingway came about a decade ago, as he reviewed a file at Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, a treasure trove of materials on the great American writer.
He found a letter from T. Norman “Tubby” Williams, who was hired at the Kansas City Star soon after Hemingway joined the paper in 1917 as a $15-a-week cub reporter. “I’d give a million dollars … if I possessed your originality,” Williams wrote. “You see things. You know things. You read human interest like a book. And above all you can tell it.”
The letter — proof that Hemingway’s first newspaper job helped to mold him into the venerated wordsmith he became — convinced Paul he was on the right track. “The voice of Tubby Williams,” Paul writes, “gave me new inspiration and confidence that there was still a story to tell about Hemingway’s early life.”
Hemingway at Eighteen is Paul’s chronicle of the pivotal year when Hemingway wrote his first words for publication (not counting his high school paper in Oak Park) and embarked on the first of many death-defying adventures, as an ambulance driver on the Italian front during the First World War.
Hemingway’s six-month stint at the Star, one of America’s great newspapers, has been overlooked or under-explored by biographers. Recent Hemingway books have focused on everything from misdiagnosed brain trauma to his alleged role as a Soviet spy, so a closer look at some of his earliest writing seems overdue.
And Paul, retired after a 40-year career as a writer and editor with the Star, is perfectly suited to dig deeper to Hemingway’s beginnings. Star journalists are a “brotherhood,” he writes, and adhered to a no-nonsense writing code: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English.” It sounds like the introductory class in a writing course called Hemingway 101.
Even though he was a rookie reporter, Hemingway was tossed into the seamy side of a city with enough violence and corruption to rate as a mini-Chicago. “This is as dirty a political town as the old smoke ville on the lake Mich,” he told his parents.
He undertook the rites of passage of the cub reporter. He covered crime and filed light features on a tractor show. He wrote obituaries and was barred from a major hospital after exposing graft and mismanagement.
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There’s a reason so few biographers have probed Hemingway’s Kansas City days — it’s impossible to identify most of the articles he filed. By-lined stories were rare in the newspapers of the time, and Hemingway rarely mentioned specific pieces in letters to family members back in Chicago.
Paul has done admirable detective work, using correspondence and other fragments of evidence to identify Hemingway’s stories (three are reproduced in an appendix). And he makes a convincing case for others that bear his stamp — crisp writing, an eye for detail and characters that come alive on the page.
Hemingway left the paper in mid-1918 and spent the second half of this formative year as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross. Paul puts less emphasis on his time in Italy — it rates only a couple of chapters — because his service in the mountains north of Milan was cut short.
Within weeks of arriving, and just shy of his nineteenth birthday, Hemingway was almost killed by a mortar shell. The Italian soldier beside him died in the explosion and Hemingway’s legs were peppered with shrapnel. He suffered additional bullet wounds as he carried another wounded soldier to safety.
His bravery earned him a medal and left him with the live-for-today attitude that would carry him through future adventures. The near-death experience shattered his “great illusion of immortality,” he later explained, and left him determined to “go out in a blaze of light.”
Hemingway at Eighteen is a valuable contribution to our understanding the origins of one of the most revered authors of the twentieth century. Hemingway went to Kansas City a “modest, rather shy and diffident boy,” Paul quotes one of his friends as observing, and emerged “aggressive and opinionated” — and with a head-start on the life experience he would channel into fiction.
He also learned a lot about writing, even though his newsroom colleagues did not realize it at the time. Nobody, a Star editor recalled, pegged him as “a ball of fire” with a “brilliant future as a writer.” And fellow reporter Clyde Roberts recalled his disappointment when he phoned in a big story and was told Hemingway was on the rewrite desk that day.
“Hemingway?” he snorted. “He can’t write.”
Which only proved, Roberts said in hindsight, “how much I knew about writing.”
NONFICTION
Hemingway at Eighteen by Steve Paul
Chicago Review Press
Published October 2017
ISBN 9781613739716
Dean Jobb teaches creative nonfiction and journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His latest book, Empire of Deception (Algonquin Books), was the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year and tells the stranger-than-fiction story of 1920s Chicago swindler Leo Koretz.
Steve Paul is an award-winning writer and editor who worked at the Kansas City Star for more than 40 years, including stints as book critic, arts editor, restaurant critic, and – before his retirement in early 2016 – editorial page editor. He is a former board member of the National Book Critics Circle and the author (and photographer) of Architecture A to Z, the editor of Kansas City Noir, and coeditor of War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings.
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When a teenaged Hemingway started to write
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By Paul Davis - - Tuesday, February 27, 2018
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
HEMINGWAY AT EIGHTEEN: THE PIVOTAL YEAR THAT LAUNCHED AN AMERICAN LEGEND
By Steve Paul
Chicago Review Press $26.99, 256 Pages
There have been books written about the late, great American writer Ernest Hemingway and his time as a cub reporter on the staff of the Kansas City Star, and there have been books written about Mr. Hemingway’s time in the Red Cross ambulance service in World War I, but Steve Paul has written an interesting book that combines the writer’s two dramatic experiences, both of which occurred during Mr. Hemingway’s 18th year.
“Hemingway is quite likely the American author of the twentieth century who has been the most argued about, dissected, and puzzled over to this day. His life grew to mythic proportions. His work, or much of it, remains canonical, inspiring, mysterious, and powerfully, surprisingly relevant to humans with a heart in a world shaped by war and anxiety. Popular culture retains him as a complicated force of nature. Books by and about him continue to make waves and news,” Mr. Paul writes in his introduction to “Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend.”
Mr. Paul admits that the book’s emphasis on a single year of a great writer’s eventful and productive life is a “presumptuous slice of biography.”
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“But what a year it was,” Mr. Paul writes. “This was the year that Hemingway’s life of self-invention began.”
In that year Mr. Hemingway’s path toward becoming a world-famous writer began in the busy newsroom of a great American newspaper and would lead him to a near-death experience in a wartime trench in Italy.
Ernest Hemingway graduated High School in June 1917 and the 18 year-old passed on attending college and instead took a job as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, thanks to an uncle who knew the newspaper’s chief editorial writer. For six and a half months the future novelist enjoyed covering fires, crime, political corruption and other news for the daily newspaper. He enjoyed his front row seat to the comedy and drama of urban life.
He also learned the basic tenets of journalism that would serve him well in the future. He learned to write fast and accurately, and he called the Star’s style of using short sentences and eliminating superfluous words the best rules he’d ever learned about the business of writing.
“For Hemingway, Kansas City was a transitional place, a stopping point between suburban youth and that traumatic, life-defining war,” Mr. Paul writes. “The newspaper work brought him close to violence almost every day: knifings and street crime, grit and desperation, the kinds of urban eruptions that gave Kansas City a Wild West reputation, even two decades into the twentieth century.”
Mr. Paul, a writer and editor who worked at the Kansas City Star for more than 40 years, does a fine job of describing the bustling life of the newspaper and the day-today lives of the newspapermen, evoking an era dramatized famously in “The Front Page.”
“The clacking of typing mills and the smoke of countless cigars filled the vast open newsroom of the Kansas City Star day and night. With a morning paper, an afternoon edition, and a regional weekly delivered to a farm audience across the country, the Star’s staff members toiled in the room from before 8:00 AM to well after midnight,” Mr. Paul writes.
“Ernest Hemingway, a young newcomer to the business, walked into this second-floor beehive in mid-October 1917 to begin his apprenticeship in journalism. He had some high school newspaper writing under his belt, but this was the big time — the Star was one of the best-known and most well-regarded newspapers in the country.”
Although Mr. Hemingway’s early pieces covered the rough-and-tumble life in Kansas, the newspaper also carried the news of the war in Europe and the future author of the WWI novel, “A Farewell To Arms,” wanted to see the war for himself.
Rejected by the U.S. Army for his poor eyesight, Mr. Hemingway instead joined the Red Cross ambulance service and served in Italy. There he witnessed the heroics and horrors of war and his experiences would later find a way into his novels. Two weeks before his 19th birthday, Mr. Hemingway was seriously wounded by a mortar shell in a trench at the front. Hundreds of metal shards from the explosion tore into his legs. An Italian soldier standing next to him was killed instantly.
While recuperating in an Italian hospital, he met and fell in love with a nurse, a romance he would go on to immortalize in “A Farewell To Arms.”
“Hemingway at Eighteen” will be enjoyed by Hemingway aficionados, like myself, as well as those interested in the early life of a great writer and the history of American literature and journalism.
• Paul Davis is a writer who covers crime, espionage and terrorism.
Hemingway's exciting days as a K.C. cub reporter recounted in book
By Harper Barnes Special to the Post-Dispatch Nov 18, 2017 (0)
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On Oct 15, 1917, three months after his 18th birthday, Ernest Hemingway boarded a train in Chicago, bound for Kansas City. There, a job awaited him as a $15-a-week cub reporter at one of the best-written newspapers in America, the Kansas City Star. Hemingway’s father drove him to the station, and the parting of father and son, Steve Paul believes, helped provide the memories that came to fruition years later in an emotional scene of parting in one of Hemingway’s best novels.
In “Hemingway at Eighteen,” Paul’s engaging and solidly researched biographical portrait of the author as a young man, Paul cites a passage from “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” published in 1940, as harking back to real events of 1917. The protagonist, Robert Jordan, says goodbye at a train station while his father breaks down in tears and utters a prayer for his son’s safety.
“Robert Jordan had been so embarrassed by all of it,” Hemingway wrote, “the damp religious sound of the prayer and by his father kissing him goodbye that he suddenly felt so much older than his father and so sorry for him that he could hardly bear it.”
Of course, Paul cautions, “one must always read Hemingway’s fiction as something other than biographical facts wrapped in invented names and situations.” But clearly Hemingway’s fiction is rooted in his personal history, and Paul has done a commendable job of digging out the personal history of Hemingway’s 18th year.
Steve Paul, like Hemingway, began working at the Kansas City Star while he was a young man, but, unlike Hemingway, Paul stayed at the paper for a full career, and his book is, in part, a love song to the Star, at least as it used to be. He studied every edition of the paper for the 6½ months Hemingway was there and read all the relevant biographical material, published and unpublished, including the letters of Hemingway and family. He speculates on what Hemingway would have taken from reading the paper — for example, in the fall of 1917, the Star ran regular spine-bracing essays from Teddy Roosevelt, who embodied the bravery and sense of honor that would mark the Hemingway hero.
Showing what Hemingway contributed to the Star in 1917 was harder. In the absence of bylines, which were quite rare in the Star in those days, Paul depends upon research, particularly into correspondence with friends and family as Hemingway bragged about stories he had covered and even sent out tear sheets. In some cases, Paul presents a story Hemingway might have written as he covered the standard cub reporter beats — the deaths, the trials, the robberies, the murders, the confidence games, the prostitution. Paul points out that Hemingway was, among other things, an ambulance chaser, and his investigative skills succeeded in bringing about improvements in the malpractice-prone city hospital system.
“For Hemingway,” Paul writes, “Kansas City was a transitional place, a stopping point between youth and the trauma of war.” Kansas City “took whatever boyhood education he had accumulated in the northern woods and gave it adult sinew and bone.” This newspaper work brought him close to violence almost every day; knifings and street crime, grit and desperation, the kinds of urban eruptions that gave Kansas City a Wild West reputation, even two decades into the twentieth century.”
And working at the Star had another benefit. The newspaper’s stylebook was justly admired, and it reads like a guide to the clear, clean prose and economy of style of Hemingway’s fiction. “Use short sentences,” it begins. “Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. ... Eliminate every superfluous word.”
Meanwhile, with America having entered the First World War, Hemingway tried to join the army, but he was rejected for bad sight in one eye. Finally, he volunteered to be a Red Cross ambulance driver and, in the spring of 1917, was sent to the Italian front. A few days shy of his 19th birthday, an Austrian shell exploded near his feet, driving more than 200 separate pieces of shrapnel into his legs. He celebrated his 19th birthday in a hospital bed. Just like Frederic Henry, the protagonist of his 1929 novel, “A Farewell to Arms,” Hemingway fell madly in love with his nurse.
Harper Barnes is the author of “Never Been a Time,” a history of the 1917 race riot in East St. Louis.