In the following essay, Johnston examines Hem-ingway's "theory of omission" and its effect on his prose style.

His stories came back in the mail, slipped through the slit in the saw-mill door where he lived, "with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but always anecdotes, sketches, contes, etc. They did not want them, and we lived on poireaux and drank cahors and water." Those were the early, lean years in Paris when Ernest Hemingway was submitting to the discipline of hunger and to the discipline of his new theory of fiction: "That you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood":

Well, I thought, now I have them so they do not understand them. There cannot be much doubt about that. There is most certainly no...