Dateline: Toronto: the Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920-1924

This is the one that catches people off guard. Hemingway. Toronto. The Star. Before the novels, before Spain, before any of it, he was here filing dispatches, covering the city, learning the craft in real time on deadline. The lean prose, the short sentence, the nothing-wasted style that would define American literature for a generation: a serious case can be made that it developed here.

Toronto was where he worked out what kind of writer he was going to be. The streets, the personalities, the texture of 1920s Toronto appears throughout these dispatches. Hemingway became Hemingway in Toronto and Toronto never told anyone. This book is the evidence.