Ian Crouch, reviewing the notes and early drafts included in a new edition of The Sun Also Rises, dishes on the back-and-forth about the novel between Hemingway and his friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald:
F. Scott Fitzgerald … after reading the version that Hemingway had sent to [editor Maxwell] Perkins, wrote a long, dismayed-sounding letter to Hemingway, in which he said, “I think that there are about 24 sneers, superiorities, and nose-thumbings-at-nothing that mar the whole narrative up to P. 29 where (after a false start on the introduction of [character Robert] Cohn) it really gets going.” Though Hemingway would later downplay Fitzgerald’s editorial influence, the published novel begins with the sentence: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.”
In the letter, Fitzgerald also criticized Hemingway for injecting his own writerly persona into the text: “That biography from you, who [always] believed in the superiority (the preferability) of the imagined to the seen not to say to the merely recounted.” With this fragment of a sentence, Fitzgerald gives Hemingway the familiar writing-class advice—show, don’t tell; less is more; and what is left out can sometimes be more meaningful than what is included. Earlier versions of the novel contained even more of this “biography”; Fitzgerald had caught the remnants of nervous self-consciousness that Hemingway himself had curtailed as he wrote.
The Dish 