E.M. Welcher’s Reviews > Conversations with Shelby Foote > Status Update

You go back and read some Hemingway and you can learn how to write. If any historian in this country wrote a single page of history that had the clarity of a single page of Hemingway, that page of history would live forever. Hemingway will teach him how to write history… When Hemingway says the marlin came out of the water endlessly, he is saying something historians will never be able to say.”

Shelby Foote: That’s right. I don’t know, personally, of any writer who didn’t start out trying to be a poet, and I think this is right and exactly as it should be. I haven’t known any good prose writers who didn’t give up poetry.

They gave it up.

John Graham: I remember Faulkner saying he gave it up because he wasn’t good enough.

Shelby Foote: Called himself a failed poet…