The Morgan’s mission of paying homage to literature and the book arts as it celebrates drawing and the graphic arts is well served by the current exhibition focused on the writings of Ernest Hemingway at the Morgan Library. Among the revelations to be experienced is the character of Hemingway’s writing process. He was known to have written on a typewriter while standing up, which proclaimed his self-image as a man of action, ready at any moment to walk to his next adventure. Lady Frances Trollope and de Tocqueville were struck by how Americans ate and drink on their feet. More than Hemingway’s broad-shouldered midwestern roots, his typed manuscripts marked up in graphite reveal a person showing, not telling, overtaken by a flood of revisions before word one is on the page. During his lifetime these documents would not have been readable in the way they are today. We might have criticized his adolescent penmanship, or how in haste he seldom wrote in horizontals. His sentences curve downward to the right, his mind fighting his body to put words on the page. Sloping scrawl speaks to his faith in savage intuition, and how haste is part of his method as much as the endless changes that follow. A few generations ago before the rise of keyboarding and the decline of penmanship these manuscripts would not have been seen as drawings. But now they can, as clear as Kid Balzac’s prose.

http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/ernest-hemingway