Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence

In 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Maxwell Perkins about a young American expatriate in Paris, an unknown writer with a "brilliant future". When Perkins wrote to Ernest Hemingway several months later, he began a correspondence spanning more than two decades and charting the career of one of the most influential American authors of this century. The letters collected here are the record of that professional alliance and of Hemingway's development as a writer.

Was it his personal desire to be in print like the men whose books he edited that made Maxwell Perkins preserve his correspondence, or a clear appreciation that his pen pals were the century's greatest writers? First there was Dear Scott, Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, which captured the exchange between Perkins, an editor at Scribner's, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who introduced Perkins to Papa. Now, with The Only Thing That Counts we have a collection of Perkins's letters to Ernest Hemingway and Hemingway's often poignant replies. The letters offer a fuller view into the relationship between a writer and editor and capture the two men in a way nothing else could.

Will today's great editors and authors care enough to back up their e-mail and thus preserve the next century's literary record?