The Editor Who Drove Hemingway Away

You may have experienced a boss who’s so intolerable, so insufferable, and so tyrannical that no other option remained but to turn in your badge or name tag and walk away forever. This is exactly what happened to American writer Ernest Hemingway. Before he was the Ernest Hemingway and collected a Nobel Prize in Literature and international recognition for his fiction-writing, his greatest nemesis wasn’t a literary critic, a tabloid reporter out to slander him, or even the FBI suspecting him of being an overseas spy agent. It was the editor of the Toronto Daily Star, Harry C. Hindmarsh.

Although Hemingway had been somewhat happily employed by the Toronto Star Weekly as a foreign correspondent since 1921, in 1923 he was unhappily transferred to feature writing for the Toronto Daily Star under the notorious Hindmarsh. Hindmarsh, personality-wise, was a battle-axe. Rather than tenderly nurture the talents of his best and most profitable writers, as many editors have been known to do, Hindmarsh’s tactic was to chop off an author’s pride at the neck, lest they dare to consider themselves too important and too indispensable to the paper. Hemingway, according to literary biographer Scott Donaldson, quickly become the target of a confidence-bruising onslaught designed to humble him and mold him into a subservient, obedient journalist.

“Hindmarsh, who was married to the daughter of the Star’s publisher, was determined to rid the paper of any potential prime donne,” Donaldson writes. When Hemingway returned to in-office work after his European sojourn, Hindmarsh

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