Edward O’Brien

Edward O’Brien occupies a small but consequential place in Ernest Hemingway’s memoir: he recognized a story before it had appeared in a magazine, and later met the loss of Hemingway’s early work with an empathy that Hemingway found striking. The account presents O’Brien less through a full biography than through two acts of reading—selecting a story and feeling its loss—and through the effect those acts had on Hemingway’s understanding of his own work.

Recognition and the Anthology

O’Brien selected Hemingway’s story My Old Man for that year’s Best Short Stories volume and dedicated the book to him. The recognition mattered especially because the story had never been published in a magazine, and O’Brien had broken his own rules to include it. Hemingway recalled that this decision helped make him confident that his stories would eventually find publication at home, even after he stopped newspaper work and the stories he submitted began coming back.

The tribute also carried an incongruous detail: O’Brien had spelled Hemingway’s name incorrectly. Hemingway remembered laughing at the mistake while thinking about the dedication and the story’s unusual route into print. The episode holds recognition and embarrassment together: O’Brien’s choice was substantial enough to bolster Hemingway’s confidence, but the misspelling gave the honor a human, faintly comic imperfection.

The Lost Manuscripts and O’Brien’s Response

Hemingway’s recollection of O’Brien is bound to the theft of Hadley Richardson’s suitcase at the Gare de Lyon. It contained the manuscripts Hemingway had written, including originals, typescripts, and carbon copies. Only two stories remained. One was My Old Man, which had survived because it was in the mail after an editor returned it; the other, Up in Michigan, had never been copied and was still in a drawer. Hemingway later showed O’Brien the racing story after the couple had left Lausanne and gone to Italy.

At the time, O’Brien was living as a boarder in a monastery above Rapallo. Hemingway describes him as gentle and shy, pale, with pale blue eyes and straight, lanky hair that he cut himself. When O’Brien read the story, Hemingway saw that he was hurt by the loss far more than Hemingway was. That response stood out: Hemingway says the only comparable reaction he had witnessed to a calamity other than death or unbearable suffering was Hadley Richardson’s distress when she told him the manuscripts were gone.

Hemingway had not initially understood the extent of the loss. Hadley Richardson had cried and could not tell him what had happened; he reassured her that whatever the dreadful news was, they would work it out. Once she told him, he arranged for someone to cover his newspaper job, took the train to Paris, and found the loss confirmed. By the time he spoke with O’Brien, that night and its immediate shock were behind him. O’Brien’s visible pain gave the loss a renewed emotional force, even as Hemingway tried to comfort him.

Encouragement and the Return to Writing

Hemingway told O’Brien not to feel so bad and suggested that losing the early work might be good for him. He said he would start writing stories again. The memoir makes the reassurance double-edged: Hemingway admits that he first said it to keep O’Brien from feeling worse, but knew, as he said it, that it was true. O’Brien’s response does not appear as advice or instruction; his evident grief prompts Hemingway to speak, and the words reveal a resolve that Hemingway recognizes in himself.

The recollection then turns from O’Brien to Hemingway’s first story after the loss, Out of Season, written in Cortina d’Ampezzo after he rejoined Hadley Richardson. Hemingway had omitted its actual ending—the old man’s suicide—because he was developing a theory that a known omission could strengthen a story and make readers feel more than they understood. This shift places O’Brien’s scene at the hinge between the destruction of Hemingway’s early work and his renewed attention to how stories could be made. The memoir does not present O’Brien as the source of Hemingway’s methods or as a continuing mentor; it shows instead how his recognition and compassion became part of Hemingway’s account of confidence, loss, and beginning again.