#maxwell perkins

[thepersonalwords]

I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]

Maxwell Perkins

[more-than-tender-curiosity]

Rereading letters between fitz and maxwell perkins

“You don’t get it dude I NEED to blow her tit clean off the whole story RELIES on it” why didnt anyone shoot this guy

[keepcalmandwritefiction]

If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.

– Maxwell Perkins

[davidhudson]

Maxwell Perkins, September 20, 1884 – June 17, 1947.

With Ernest Hemingway in 1929.

[macrolit]

Literary history that happened on 7 July

[funkymbtifiction]

Genius: Maxwell Perkins [ISFJ 9w1]

Genius: Maxwell Perkins [ISFJ 9w1]

Function Order: Si-Fe-Ti-Ne Max has an incredible ability to sense the root potential in others, beneath their absurdities; he has such profound knowledge of the craft of writing, and is such an excellent line by line editor that he sees the bare bones potential in Thomas Wolfe, after every other editor and publisher rejects his bloated first manuscript. Max handles the tedium of shaving 90…

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[manners-maketh-eggsy]

I just watched "Genius" with Colin Firth and Jude Law and am sorely disappointed by the lack of content.

Where are my fics? My gifs of the 'and still you don't know what it is to be alive' scene? My Hartwin Genius AUs? 

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The Great Chest Hair Fight

You didn't insult Ernest Hemingway and get away with it.

It all began when Max Eastman, a prominent writer and critic, reviewed Hemingway's bullfighting book, Death in the Afternoon. Although he praised Hemingway's writing for its “big humor and reckless straight talk,” he also lobbed some zingers. “There is an unconscionable quantity of bull—to put it as decorously as possible—poured and plastered all over what he writes about bullfights,” Eastman wrote. “It is of course a commonplace that anyone who too much protests his manhood lacks the serene confidence that he is made out of iron. ... [S]ome circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity. "The novelist's writing style, Eastman lamented, had" begotten a veritable school of fiction writers — a literary style, you might say, of wearing false hair on the chest. "He added," Come out from behind all of that false hair on your chest, Ernest. We all know you. "

Four years later, in August of 1937, Hemingway went to see his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in his office in New York. He walked in to see that Perkins had a visitor: Max Eastman. He greeted the critic pleasantly, and for a while it looked like all would be well. Then Papa caught sight of a book on Perkins's desk that included Eastman's “Bull in the Afternoon” critique.

"When I saw that," Hemingway said, "I began to get sore." He ripped open his shirt and asked, in what he later claimed was "a playful manner," whether his chest was "hairy enough for anybody." He challenged Eastman to say that the hair was false. Then he tore open Eastman's shirt to reveal a hairless chest. Perkins, trying to keep things light, then exposed his own.

Hemingway tried to get Eastman to read aloud the offending review, but Eastman declined. The bullfighting enthusiast then took the book and read some of the more inflammatory passages. Then he snapped it shut over Eastman's nose.

What happened next is open to debate. Hemingway contended that the older man "jumped at me like a woman - clawing me, you know, with his open hands." Whoever started it, a struggle ensued. Eastman claimed that he threw the author over the desk and stood him with his head in the corner. Hemingway denied this and said that if he had hit Eastman, who was sitting on a window seat, "I might have knocked him through that window and out into Fifth Avenue." But he later challenged Eastman to a fight in a closed room, provided the critic waived all damages and medical costs.

He didn't stop there. Taking the book with which he had assaulted Eastman, he wrote in the flyleaf, "This is the book I ruined on Max (the Prick) Eastman's nose, I sincerely hope he burns forever in some hell of his own digging." The book with the inscription can be seen at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

Artwork: Carlyn Beccia via medium.com