ABSTRACT
"The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare", is Ernest Hemingway. Yet Hemingway too, one way or another, is literature. If his preoccupation has been mortality, his ambition - spurred perhaps by having easily won such rewards as contemporaries offer - is nothing less than immortality. He does not seem to have cast a very wide net. Given the scope and impact of his author, we might fairly expect international representation. But, except for one Soviet contribution, the table of contents is one-hundred-percent American, thereby excluding such significant essays as the almost classical polemic of Wyndham Lewis or the more recent appreciation of Claude-Edmonde Magny. Mr. Hemingway, in his turn, would hardly be himself - which he is, of course, quite as consciously as any writer could be - if he did not take a dim view of criticism.
