Quote by Ernest Hemingway
I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
Summary
In this quote, the author expresses their opposition to the practice of delving into the personal lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them. They criticize the current state of literary criticism which seems to be a blend of nosy journalists, amateur psychoanalysts borrowing theories from Freud and Jung, and gossip columnists. The author refers to young English professors who see potential for sensationalist literary analysis in scrutinizing and interpreting the intimate details of an author's life, specifically their sexual relationships. Overall, the quote highlights a disdain for the invasion of an author's privacy and the focus on scandalous details rather than the art itself.
Topics
Legacy
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