....hopefully not of the shameless, self-indulgent variety.
In March, I gave a talk at the Library of Congress, sponsored by the Humanities & Social Sciences Division. The subject was my recent book, Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry. I discussed, among other things, the letters the authors exchanged in mid-1947 after Faulkner's public remark about Hemingway's lack of artistic courage.
The webcast is now available via YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMMbj1JdXhI
One of the most fulfilling parts of this project was examining Hemingway's papers, which are housed in Boston at the Kennedy Presidential Library. I remember looking through folders containing hundreds of letters, always scanning for a single word: "Faulkner." Though the two authors never had a social relationship, they were very aware of each other psychologically.
Our next book, Faulkner's The Wild Palms, shows him having some fun with Hemingway's name and writings, including a "hemingwaves" pun and riffs on A Farewell to Arms.
