Technique, however, is not enough to make a great writer, and that is what we have been asked to believe Mr. Hemingway was in process of becoming. The indications of such a growth are absent from this book … There is evidence of no mental growth whatever; there is no better understanding of life, no increase in his power to illuminate it or even to present it. Essentially, this new novel is an empty book.
—The New York Times review of To Have and Have Not, 1937
The Sun Also Rises is the kind of book that makes this reviewer at least almost plain angry.
—The Chicago Tribune
[His characters are as] shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotion.
—The Dial, reviewing The Sun Also Rises
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