times in life, he said, and he thought they should come out of it fighting, not whining in public.

During the spring of 1936 Hemingway had resumed his bullying of Scott Fitzgerald.

Hollywood studios were filled with a “strange conglomeration of a few excellent overtired men making the pictures and as dismal a crowd of fakes and hacks at the bottom as you can imagine.” The consequence, Scott said, “is that every other man is a charlatan, nobody trusts anybody else, and an infinite amount of time is wasted from lack of confiden

True to his word, Perkins described for Miss Lemmon a typical workday: Tuesday, July 29, 1935. As always, Max said, he began with the heap of mail waiting on his desk.

If an author worried too much about plot, Max said, he might become “sort of muscle-bound,” whereas he must be flexible.

The day before she left, Hemingway tussled six hours and fifty minutes with a 514-pound tuna. When his Pilar cruised into harbor at 9:30 that night, the whole population of the island flocked to see his fish and hear his tale. “A fatuous old man with a new yacht and a young bride had arrived not long previously, announcing that tuna-fishing, of who

Back at the office, Max managed to dictate the rest of his letters just before the tennis champion Helen Wills Moody strode in.

When a book was declared out of print, it meant that the publisher, because of lack of demand for the book, had decided not to print any more copies and to let the current inventory run out; the author was indeed free to seek a new publisher.

“A publisher is a man who is blamed if a book fails and ignored if it proves a success.”