Two months ago, I watched "Ernest Hemingway: Rivers to the Sea" on PBS. The program told the story of Hemingway mainly through Hemingway's own words. As the program progressed, I sat in disbelief listening to all the lengthy quotes from Hemingway's works. While I think this is an appropriate way to tell the story of a writer's life, I couldn't help wondering what type of arrangement the filmmaker (DeWitt Sage) made with the Hemingway estate to allow all of the excerpts to be used.

The picture became clearer when I read an online interview with DeWitt Sage. He explained the genesis of his Hemingway documentary: "AMERICAN MASTERS did a film that I directed and produced with Catherine Collins about F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was broadcast soon after September 11, 2001. And shortly after that we got a fax and a phone call from one Michael Katakis, who is the executor of the Hemingway estate. They wondered if we would be able to do their 'complicated character,' as they put it, and wondered if I would be interested in coming out to Bozeman, Montana, to meet Patrick Hemingway, the sole surviving son, and his wife Carol."

I certainly wish I was in Sage's position a few years ago when I submitted a proposal to Simon & Schuster detailing a Hemingway quotations book. Quoting from the proposal: "Organized into thirty chapters, containing close to 1000 quotations from the author’s letters, fiction, interviews, dispatches, and even poems, this book draws from the most disparate of sources to show the immense scope and genius of Hemingway’s thoughts and observations." The proposal was rejected on the grounds that Hemingway would not have endorsed the dissecting of his works into a quote collection. The true test of a writer, in my humble opinion, is if his words *do* read well outside of their context. Hemingway's one true sentences read beautifully in isolation and make a more powerful statement on their own. "It would have been a fine quote book," he said, "a fine quote book."