Cultural Conversations: Woolf’s 1927 Review Of Hemingway

In 1927 Virginia Woolf reviewed Ernest Hemingway’s Men without Women for the Sunday Books supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. Woolf envisioned her review as a conversation with the author to help him or her improve future work—a cultural conversation, to use Patrick Collier’s term. By publishing in the Herald Tribune, she wrote for a venue popular with American expatriates, one Hemingway and his friends were likely to read. Perhaps as a result of the review, both Hemingway and Woolf began to develop their own aesthetics, in Death in the Afternoon and A Room of One’s Own, respectively.