Read an Excerpt
She met Hemingway once, she says, in Shakespeareand Co., the Paris bookstore owned by Sylvia Beach. Miss Beach grasped the hand of each-Hemingway imposing and dramatic in rainy trenchcoat-and said: "I want the two best modern American writers to know each other." The phone rang, Miss Beach ducked out for a moment. "Hemingway and I stood and gazed unwinkingly at each other with poker faces for all of ten seconds, in silence. Hemingway then turned in one wide swing and hurled himself into the rainy darkness as he had hurled himself out of it, and that was all. I am sorry if you are disappointed. All personal lack of sympathy and attraction aside, and they were real in us both, it must have been galling to this most famous young man to have his name pronounced in the same breath as a writer with someone he had never heard of, and a woman at that. I nearly felt sorry for him," Miss Porter recalls...
