The Friendship and Rivalry Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway met at the Dingo Bar in Paris in May 1925, about a month after the publication of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald was already famous, with the talent Hemingway would later compare to dust on a butterfly’s wings, a gift that looked natural even when the drafts revealed the work beneath it. Hemingway was still making his reputation, partly on the page and partly in the Spanish bullrings where he gathered material for the man he intended to become. At twenty-eight, Fitzgerald had published three novels and become the public face of the Jazz Age. Hemingway had earned respect among expatriate writers, but his American story collection In Our Time had yet to appear, and the novel that would transform his career remained unwritten (University of South Carolina Libraries).

The Great Gatsby had received mixed reviews and disappointing sales. Fewer than 25,000 copies would sell before Fitzgerald’s death in 1940 (Hastings). Hemingway’s reputation, meanwhile, was about to rise with remarkable speed. Fitzgerald entered the friendship as the successful writer, with enough influence to open a publisher’s door for someone else. At the time, helping Hemingway looked like simple generosity. Years later, the favor would still be sitting between them.

The favor Fitzgerald never got back

Fitzgerald began advocating for Hemingway before the two men had met. In October 1924, he wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, about a young American writer in Paris who had “a brilliant future.” His verdict was emphatic: “He’s the real thing.” Fitzgerald had read Hemingway’s slender Paris collection in our time and wanted Perkins to pursue him (Bruccoli, 1994).

Perkins contacted Hemingway, but Boni & Liveright had already offered him a contract. Fitzgerald kept Scribner’s interested, and the publisher was ready when Hemingway became free to move (American Writers Museum).

His contribution extended beyond introductions. Fitzgerald read the proofs of The Sun Also Rises and urged Hemingway to remove the long opening, where the novelist explained his characters before allowing them to live on the page. Hemingway cut two chapters, roughly the first fifteen pages. The revision moved the reader closer to the action and gave the novel more of the restraint that would become inseparable from Hemingway’s name (Library of America).

Writers rarely enjoy admitting that somebody else recognized the proper beginning of their novel before they did. Hemingway accepted Fitzgerald’s judgment, and the book improved. When The Sun Also Rises appeared in 1926, it established Hemingway as a leading figure of literary modernism. Within little more than a year, Hemingway’s career was moving faster than Fitzgerald’s.

When the roles reversed

Hemingway followed The Sun Also Rises with A Farewell to Arms in 1929, adding commercial success to his growing literary reputation. By then the persona he’d been assembling in the bullrings had fully arrived in print. Readers witnessed the nerve, the composure, a man who wrote about danger the way other men wrote about weather. They met the writer and the character he’d built at the same time, and mistook one for the other. Fitzgerald spent much of the next nine years trying to finish Tender Is the Night. During that period, Zelda Fitzgerald experienced repeated psychiatric crises and hospitalizations, while Scott wrote magazine stories to meet their expenses. Hemingway’s career gathered momentum as Fitzgerald struggled to recover his own (University of South Carolina Libraries).

When Tender Is the Night appeared in 1934, Fitzgerald wanted Hemingway’s opinion badly enough to ask for it. Hemingway answered with a long, serious critique. He accused Fitzgerald of mishandling some of his material and urged him to use personal suffering with greater discipline. On the envelope flap, however, Hemingway added that he had failed to mention the good parts and assumed Fitzgerald knew how good they were. The kindness arrived outside the letter, almost as though there had been no room for it on the page (Penn State University).

Several years later, Hemingway reread the novel and told Perkins he had been too hard on it; its quality, he said, was almost frightening. The praise Fitzgerald had wanted arrived late and went to someone else (Penn State University).

By the mid-1930s, Fitzgerald had begun asking Hemingway for the reassurance he once gave so freely.

“Please lay off me in print”

In early 1936, Fitzgerald published the essays later collected as The Crack-Up. He wrote openly about his emotional collapse, unsettling friends who preferred literary suffering at a more discreet distance. That August, Hemingway published “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in Esquire. The story referred to “poor Scott Fitzgerald” and portrayed him as a writer damaged by his romantic awe of the wealthy. Hemingway had taken Fitzgerald’s public confession of private suffering and worked it into the thoughts of a fictional writer contemplating his wasted talent (University of South Carolina Libraries).

Fitzgerald responded in a brief letter:

“Please lay off me in print…. It’s a fine story, one of your best…. Ever your friend.”

He explained that the passage had cost him a night’s sleep and asked Hemingway to remove his name when the story appeared in a book. He also praised the story that had wounded him. Fitzgerald refused to confuse Hemingway’s cruelty with poor writing, even when the cruelty had been directed at him (Bruccoli, 1994).

When “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was collected in 1938, “Scott Fitzgerald” became “Julian.” The rest of the passage remained. According to the editorial notes accompanying their correspondence, Perkins had insisted on the change. Fitzgerald’s name disappeared while Hemingway’s judgment of him stayed on the page (Bruccoli, 1994).

Fitzgerald asked for mercy and still praised the story. Hemingway removed the name and left the judgment in place. Fitzgerald took the hit and complimented the swing.

The friend who survived

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in December 1940. He was forty-four years old and believed his literary standing had largely disappeared. Only seven copies of The Great Gatsby sold during the final month of his life, and his royalties for the entire year amounted to $13.13. The novel’s postwar revival, helped by the distribution of 155,000 Armed Services Editions in 1945, belonged to a future he never saw (Hastings).

Hemingway lived another twenty-one years. He published For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, won the Pulitzer Prize and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. When he died by suicide in 1961, he left behind an unfinished memoir of his Paris years. Editors assembled A Moveable Feast and published it in 1964 (Nobel Prize Outreach; John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum).

The memoir helped cement the popular image of Fitzgerald as a brilliant, fragile man who drank badly, worried constantly, and failed to protect his talent. The memoir remembers Fitzgerald fondly in places, then supplies the humiliations readers tend to remember. Fitzgerald had been dead for more than two decades and could offer no portrait of Hemingway in return.

Years later, scholars opened the manuscripts and found a book far less settled than the 1964 edition had made it appear. At a 2009 Kennedy Library forum on the restored edition, Seán Hemingway explained that the first edition had been presented as a finished work even though Hemingway was still revising it near the end of his life. The order of some chapters had been changed, other material had been added, and an ending had been assembled from passages Hemingway had considered using elsewhere (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum).

The manuscripts also contained two versions of Hemingway’s famous butterfly image for Fitzgerald’s talent. In one, Fitzgerald became conscious of his damaged wings and learned to fly again. The 1964 edition used an earlier, darker version in which he could no longer fly because the instinct had left him. Hemingway’s grandson confirmed that the original editors had selected the earlier draft (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum).

Hemingway left the butterfly in two different conditions. The published version kept him on the ground; another draft allowed Fitzgerald to fly again.

What the rivalry became

The billing changed as Hemingway’s books began arriving regularly and attracting the kind of attention that makes every room feel arranged around the author. Fitzgerald spent years trying to finish Tender Is the Night while Zelda moved through hospitals and the family expenses kept demanding magazine stories. By 1934, Fitzgerald was asking Hemingway for the judgment he had once been secure enough to offer. That reversal gave every opinion more weight than it should have carried. A critique from Hemingway could feel like a verdict from the future.

Their letters still contain affection. They also show how quickly affection becomes complicated when one friend begins to represent everything the other fears he has lost. Hemingway’s discipline, fame and cultivated nerve made Fitzgerald’s stalled career look worse by comparison. Fitzgerald’s drinking and financial trouble offered Hemingway an image of the gifted writer overtaken by his own life. Fitzgerald’s life had begun supplying Hemingway with a theory of how gifted writers fail.

Hemingway eventually carried that argument into print. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” turned Fitzgerald into an example of wasted promise. A Moveable Feast made the portrait larger and harder to escape. It was Fitzgerald who drank badly, worried constantly, and seemed unable to protect the gift that had once come so naturally. Hemingway had known him closely enough to make the account persuasive and survived long enough to make it authoritative.

Fitzgerald’s reputation had already fallen during his lifetime. His books sold poorly near the end, and the culture had begun treating him like a souvenir from a party everyone regretted attending. Hemingway gave the decline a memorable plot: a brilliant young writer falls in love with wealth, loses control and ruins the talent he was given. That version traveled well because it fit into a sentence. The truth required Zelda’s illness, hospital bills, magazine deadlines and a novel Fitzgerald kept trying to get right.

The readers Fitzgerald needed arrived after he was gone. The Great Gatsby found the audience that had failed to appear in 1925. Tender Is the Night acquired admirers who understood that its instability belonged partly to its subject. Fitzgerald’s manuscripts revealed the labor beneath prose that often looked effortless.

Hemingway’s papers unsettled his version too. His letters preserve admiration for Fitzgerald beside the impatience and cruelty. The drafts of A Moveable Feast leave the butterfly image unresolved. The published edition gives us Fitzgerald with wings too damaged for flight. Another draft allows him to understand the damage and fly again. Hemingway had several decades to decide what Fitzgerald meant to him and still left two answers in the manuscript (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum).

The old debt remained. Fitzgerald spent influence on Hemingway before Hemingway had much of his own. Years later, Hemingway turned the friend who had helped him into an example of what happens when talent loses control of its life. By then, Fitzgerald had been dead for decades, and the role was his to keep.

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References

American Writers Museum. “‘Such Friends’: Maxwell Perkins and Ernest Hemingway.” 15 November 2017.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship. Carroll & Graf, 1994.

Hastings, Patrick. “The Not-So-Great Gatsby.” Bibliomania, Library of Congress, 10 April 2025.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. “A Moveable Feast.” Kennedy Library Forum, 20 September 2009.

Library of America. The Annotated Sun Also Rises. Edited by Robert W. Trogdon, introduction by Adam Gopnik.

Nobel Prize Outreach. “Ernest Hemingway: Facts.” NobelPrize.org.

Penn State University. “New Hemingway Letters Reveal Friendships and Feuds With Other Famous Writers.”

University of South Carolina Libraries. “A Fitzgerald Chronology.” Matthew J. Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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