Hemingway compiled this reading list for Arnold Samuelson, an aspiring writer who formed a friendship with Hemingway in the spring of 1934. After hitchhiking from Minneapolis to Key West to meet his idol, Samuelson spent nearly a year with the Hemingway family, accompanying the author on fishing trips and drinking sessions. Hemingway regarded reading as fundamental to the process of learning how to write well, and this list of sixteen works gives us an insight into what he considered essential reading for any up-and-coming writer. When Hemingway handled this to Samuelson, he told him:” Here is a list of books any writer should have read as a part of his education … if you haven’t read these, you just aren’t educated.”
They are,
Stephen Crane —
The Blue Hotel
The Open Boat
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Dubliners – James Joyce
The Red and the Black – by Stendhal
Of Human Bondage – Somerset Maugham
Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
War and Peace – Tolstoy
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
Hail and Farewell – George Moore
Brothers Karamazov- Dostoyevsky
Oxford Book of English Verse –
The Enormous Room – E. E. Cummings
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Far Away and Long Ago – W. H. Hudson
The American – Henry James
A World without Gaps 