With Hemingway — A Year in Key West and Cuba

Arnold Samuelson

In 1934, at the height of the Depression a young man rode the rails from Minneapolis to Key West to ask Hemingway’s advice about writing…

Arnold Samuelson could easily have been a character out of a Hemingway short story: he certainly has a touch of Nick Adams about him and, like Hemingway, he also had a domineering mother who insisted he make something of himself. But how was he to achieve anything in the middle of a depression that had put 14 million people out of work in the US. And although he’d studied journalism at college he never officially graduated because he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) pay the $5 diploma fee.

Diploma or no diploma Arnold was still determined to become a writer.

In 1932, he had to get away from the farm (his family were Norwegian immigrant wheat farmers) and the recent brutal murder of his sister. He needed space. Arnold then, having done a deal with a local newspaper, and with a friend, took off (in a snow storm)to explore the world, or at least that part of the world the rail tracks might take them. He took a pair of hair-cutting shears with him to earn the cost of a meal or two, and his violin, which, as his daughter writes in the foreword to Samuelson’s book: