'You've bollixed up my book': letter reveals Hemingway's fury at being censored

The author threatened to ditch his British publisher, and likened him to a vicar, after his ‘Anglo-Saxon’ expressions were cleaned up

The hard-drinking, hot-tempered American writer Ernest Hemingway was furious when he discovered that the language for the English edition of his latest book had been cleaned up, a previously unpublished letter reveals. “I will make my own bloody decisions as to what I write and what I do not write,” he raged to his British publisher, adding that he did not want the book to be “bollixed up”.

The fury within the lines of the letter would have left Jonathan Cape in no doubt of Hemingway’s feelings about editorial changes to his 1932 nonfiction book about bull-fighting, Death in the Afternoon. That those changes were made without his knowledge or permission left him all the more outraged.

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