I had a friend once who used to worry that, with the advent of the personal computer, writers wouldn’t leave the same amount of material behind for scholars to study (early drafts, notes, outlines, etc.).

I thought about that when I read this article: “Hemingway Was a Pack Rat. Here’s What His Mementos Reveal.“

It’s an interesting article, about what sounds like an interesting exhibition at the Morgan Library. We find out that Hemingway was as meticulous about tracking his daily word count as any participant in NaNoWriMo, and he had no problem starting to write a novel with no idea where he was going. And he often wrote first drafts in pencil, on loose sheets of paper or in notebooks (when he was in Paris, he used the French notebooks called cahiers).

And we see the perils of being a beta reader, as Hemingway dropped F. Scott Fitzgerald as a friend after Fitzgerald gave him too many good editing suggestions on his first two novels.

I’m not worried about future generations of literary scholars. For one thing, there will always be pack rats. I probably have every revision of everything I’ve ever written stored somewhere. None of it is particularly well organized (to say the least), but that’s the scholars’ job, not mine.