Making an Example out of Ernest Hemingway and His Corresponding Postcards

This chapter uses Ernest Hemingway’s lifelong relationship with postcards in his fiction and correspondence to showcase how postcard biases in the publication of author correspondence eliminate important epistolary materialities from the biographical record. By critically examining the ongoing publishing history of Hemingway’s correspondence, this chapter highlights how the author’s own epistles reveal just how attuned a media specialist he was to the metacommunicative potentials of strategically selected missive materialities, especially postcards. This chapter concludes with close readings of Hemingway’s deployment of postcard materialities in his journalism and fiction.