Re: RARA-AVIS: Burroughs'

From: Richard Moore ( moorich@aol.com)
Date: 27 Nov 2007


--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, Terrill Lankford
<lankford2000@...> wrote:
> Think Chandler read
> >Burroughs? What about Hammett?
> >
>
>
> I'm not sure about Chandler or Hammett, but I bet Hemingway did. :)
>

I don't have my Hemingway bios handy but I recall that he did read at least the early Edgar Rice Burroughs stories. They were both residents of Oak Park, Illinois when Burroughs began his writing career and Hemingway was a teenager. Young Ernest would certainly have heard of Burroughs as he was a local celebrity once the Tarzan stories took off in popularity.

Years later they nearly met. Both were dining in a Honolulu restaurant in February 1941--Burroughs with his much younger second wife Florence and Hemingway with his third wife Martha Gellhorn. To tie the thread together, Gellhorn and Hemingway had met behind the Loyalist lines in Spain.

Florence Burroughs tried to prod her husband into going over to the Hemingway table and introducing himself. But it wasn't to be. Florence had pretended to swoon when she spotted Hemingway, a joke that irritated her older husband, and her prodding on the introduction made him angry that she would be so starstruck. The marriage had about run its course and this was just one milestone on the way to divorce.

Richard Moore



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