Dateline: Toronto

Dateline: Toronto is a collection of most of the stories that Ernest Hemingway wrote as a stringer and later staff writer and foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star between 1920 and 1924. The stories were written while he was in his early 20s before he became well-known, and show his development as a writer. The collection was edited by William White, a professor of English literature and journalism at Wayne State University, and a regular contributor to The Hemingway Review. In 1920, after returning from World War I, Hemingway moved to Toronto where he began freelancing for the Toronto Star Weekly, part of the Toronto Star. For his earliest work, he was paid $5 and eventually hired by the paper. On March 6, 1920, he received his first byline for the Toronto Star Weekly, a story entitled "Taking a Chance for a Free Shave." The story was about a trip to a barber college, where shaves were free, but performed by inexperienced barbers still in training. Hemingway continued writing features at a rate of about one a week. He stayed in Toronto off and on for two years, earning about$45 a week. During this time he wrote stories on a wide array of subjects—from the benefits of centralized government purchasing ("Buying Commission Would Cut Out Waste", The Toronto Daily Star, April 26, 1920) to a boxing match between Georges Carpentier and Jack Dempsey ("Carpentier Sure to Give Dempsey Fight Worth While", The Toronto Star Weekly, October 30, 1920) to a humorous look at returning World War I veterans ("Lieutenants' Mustaches the Only Permanent Thing We Got Out of War", The Toronto Star Weekly, April 10, 1920.) In 1921 Hemingway returned to Chicago and wrote dispatches from there. In December 1921, his career changed forever when he went to Europe with his wife and where, as a foreign correspondent, he wrote human-interest stories about post-war conditions. There he made his first experience of bullfighting, the sport that came to be so important in his writings. After much success as a foreign correspondent, Hemingway returned to Toronto in 1923.