BADASS WHATEVERDAY: Ernest Hemingway

*Bonus: LIFE just posted some previously unpublished photos of Hemingway. Don't say we never gave ya nothin'.

Saturday was the 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's death. He wrote. He was succinct. He was part of the Lost Generation. Regardless of what you think about his character, or what you believe about his ideologies, he made an impact. If you're not familiar with his work, you're missing out, so we suggest you get that way.

He was, of course, a writer not a sartorialist. But when I look at his writing style, I learn things about my dressing style. In his writing, he was a master of "economy and understatement." So, too, in his attire.

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master," he famously said, talking about writing, not clothing. But I'd wager it's applicable. Clothes are the means, not the end.

Hemingway wrote while he was in love, and he wrote when those women stopped loving him. Some quotes:

• "I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division." — in a letter to Marlene Dietrich (July 1, 1930).
• "All good books have one thing in common: They are truer than if they had really happened."
• "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
• "Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it—don’t cheat with it.”

More bullets. There are a couple of things we like about Hemingway:

• The Kansas City connection. (True story: Hemingway and I both worked at the Kansas City Star.)
• The Chicago connection.
• His impact on American literature.

Fifty years dead. Let's remember by reading. We like people who read.

[Photos via Google Image Search.]

Tools of the trade

Leather journal, thrifted sportcoat, J.Crew button-down, Saddleback briefcase, thrifted Giorgio Bruttini loafers and Corona portable typewriter from the mid to late 1920s.

Some of these items are called into action daily. That blazer fits me almost as well as if it had been tailored...one of the best coats I've owned, and a steal at $6. The elbow pads actually serve a utilitarian purpose for all the days I'm hunched over my desk. When the coat finally craps out on me, I'll take it apart and see if I can't make a pattern from it.

The kind of writing I do (mainly the electronic, 21st century kind) may not be best accomplished on a manual typewriter. But it helps to have one around, if only for the inspiration. Same reason I've got pictures of some of these guys (hi-ya, Faulkner) hung around my office. And every so often, I light up my pipe, pour a glass of scotch and thwack the 90-year-old keys to get some thoughts in ink on paper.

The typewriter was going to be a July birthday present for my then-girlfriend, also a writer. I was spending the summer as a reporter in sweltering Mississippi, where the heat is so heavy the lakes become hottubs by the end of June.

I hunted for the damn thing for weeks, finally finding it in a junk shop deep in plantation country. The owner—an old, penny-pinching, Southern fella—was reluctant to part with it and asked for about twice what it was worth. We ended up making a deal we were both unhappy with, which I suppose is the sign of a good trade.

I took it back to the antebellum house where I was living and spent a few hours cleaning it up, oiling it, making it maybe worth what the old fella initially wanted for it. Summer ended, and the word-machine came with me to a big-city newspaper where I covered politics. Now, I'm in Chicago—an even bigger city with different stories—and I've still got that old typewriter.

Photography by Jeff Kieslich