Iceberg Theory - Background

Background

Like other American writers such as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather, Hemingway worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist. After graduating from high school he went to work as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star, where he quickly learned that truth often lurks below the surface of a story. He learned about corruption in city politics, and that in hospital emergency rooms and police stations a mask of cynicism was worn "like armour to shield whatever vulnerabilities remained". In his pieces he wrote about relevant events, excluding the background. As foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, while living in Paris in the early 1920s, he covered the Greco-Turkish War. He wrote 14 articles for the newspaper, but his biographer Jeffrey Meyers explains, he wrote in such a way that "he objectively reported only the immediate events in order to achieve a concentration and intensity of focus—a spotlight rather than a stage". From the Greco-Turkish War he gained valuable writing experience that he translated to the writing of fiction. He believed fiction could be based on reality, but that if an experience were to be distilled, as he explained, then "what he made up was truer than what he remembered".