That Ernest Hemingway was, for years, the most celebrated writer in America is hardly surprising. After all, if he had written nothing besides, say, The Sun Also Rises, the early collection, In Our Time, and the magisterial "Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," he would still be an utterly indispensable American writer. The preposterous and romantic literary myth that Hemingway himself created and nurtured, meanwhile — that of the brawling, hard-drinking, thrill-seeking sportsman who is also an uncompromising, soulful artist — ensured that generations of writers would not merely revere him, but (often to their own abiding detriment) would also try to emulate him.

By Tarn Wilson

I have a friend, a single man in his late forties, who still broods over the love he didn’t get—still doesn’t get—from his emotionally inaccessible parents. They are the cause of all his suffering, he believes, the cause of his failed relationships. Even as I nod compassionately over our herbal tea, I want to shake him and scream, “They’ll never change!