“It’s a hell of a nuisance once they’ve had you certified as nutty,” Nick said. “No one ever has any confidence in you again.”
—Ernest Hemingway, “A Way You’ll Never Be”

The posthumous publication last year of Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden—based on unfinished manuscripts that lay in the vault for more than twenty-five years after Hemingway’s death—created something of a double sensation in literary circles. Begun in 1946, this novel was intended by Hemingway to be his most extensive and mature treatment of the themes of good and evil, innocence and corruption, and sex in its relation to the literary art. But the size and complexity of his imaginative task and Hemingway’s physical injuries and illnesses, culminating finally in a full-blown case of depressive paranoia and his suicide in 1961, prevented him from completing the work, although it deeply absorbed him for nearly two decades.

The manuscript of The Garden of Edenexists in three irreconcilable drafts of varying lengths. To get the story into publishable shape, Tom Jenks, a Scribner’s editor, did a cut-and-paste job on the longest of these manuscripts (a version of some twelve hundred pages)—deleting a great deal, changing around much else—thus producing the version that we now have. The result bears a suspicious resemblance to Thomas Wolfe’s last two novels, which by common consent are now to be seen as the “compositions” of his Harper’s editor, Edward Aswell. In any case, so altered and manipulated were the