Write Like Hemingway

An examination of how The Kansas City Star’s style guide shaped Hemingway’s unmistakable writing style.

Acclaimed for his lean, succinct prose, Write Like Hemingway connects the dots between Ernest Hemingway’s earliest writing job and his most memorable fiction. After graduating high school, and before heading to Italy to drive an ambulance during World War I, “Papa” spent about 6 months over the course of 1917 and 1918 writing police reports for The Kansas City Star. Following the paper’s style guide, with rules like “Use short sentences,” and approximately 100 more similarly exacting ones, Hemingway learned how to write, and carried these lessons of narrative economy with him for the rest of his life.