Talk:rich

Hemingway & Fitzgerald

Obviously the most famous quote here is the exchange, "You know, the rich are not like you and me." "They have more money," the problem being it never happened. Actual sources of the idea quoted.

As far as the origin of the apocryphal version:

Over the years, a legend about an exchange of views on the very rich between Fitzgerald and Hemingway has grown up and become an apocryphal part of literary history. In his notebooks, Fitzgerald wrote, “They have more money. (Ernest's wisecrack.)” When editing The Crack-Up, Edmund Wilson included a number of entries from Fitzgerald's notebooks, including that one. In a footnote, Wilson incorrectly explained that “Fitzgerald had said, 'The rich are different from us.' Hemingway had replied, 'Yes, they have more money.'” Lionel Trilling repeated “the famous exchange” in one influential essay, and Harry Levin did in another. So the story has come down to us that the discussion about the very rich—as told in “Snows”—really took place between Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and that Hemingway got the better of it by making the “more money” wisecrack. There was such a discussion, and in it Mary Colum one-upped Hemingway, not Hemingway Fitzgerald. And even in “Snows,” Ernest did not claim credit for the “Yes, they have more money” line, assigning it to an unspecified “someone.” (In an early draft of “Snows,” Hemingway gave the retort to his protagonist Harry, a fictionalized version of himself.) In the construction of legends, truth cannot compete with fiction.

 — LlywelynII 01:06, 3 February 2022 (UTC)