Analysis
How the Toronto Star drove Ernest Hemingway out of Canada
Hemingway might have changed Canadian literature forever if he stayed. Here’s why he didn’t.
Updated 3 hrs ago, July 19, 2026, 7 min read
By Richard Warnica Senior Opinion Writer
Like Ernest Hemingway, Michael Ondaatje — for my money the greatest Canadian writer who has ever lived — didn’t move to Canada until after he turned 18. Ondaatje arrived in Toronto in 1963, 43 years after Hemingway first moved to the city and two years after the older man shot himself to death at his house in Ketchum, Idaho. But unlike Hemingway, Ondaatje stayed. He studied at the University of Toronto, got a job teaching English, fell in with the local poets and became one of a handful of the most important artists in this city’s history.
Where Hemingway found a “milling, stinking, sweating, money grubbing place,” in Toronto, Ondaatje found a canvas. “Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined,” he wrote in “In the Skin of a Lion,” his best and most Toronto-centric novel. And the city Ondaatje imagined in the years after the First World War was the opposite of the one Hemingway experienced, in two stints between 1920 and 1924.
Ondaatje’s invented Toronto was full of sex, theft, money, class, and conscious reinvention. His hero, Patrick Lewis, arrived at Union Station in 1923 “as if it were land after years at sea.” “Now, in the city,” Ondaatje wrote, “he was new even to himself.” Hemingway, too, came to Toronto in 1923. But where the fictional Lewis found blood, romance and intrigue, the real Hemingway came away with nothing but misery.
Hemingway had planned to stay for at least a year in Toronto when he arrived with his very pregnant first wife in 1923. Instead, he skipped town with Hadley and their newborn child — literally running out on the lease at their Bathurst apartment — after just four months. “It was a bad move to come back,” Hemingway wrote his friends Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas back in Paris. “The people,” he added in a letter to Ezra Pound, “are all merde.”
That is the great ‘what if?’ about Hemingway’s time in Toronto, which will be celebrated this month at a gathering of the International Hemingway Society at the Chelsea Hotel on Gerard Street. What if, like Ondaatje, Hemingway had stayed? What if he had built his career here? What if Hemingway was remembered today not as the most famous American writer of the 20th century, not as an American expat or an American at all, but as a … Canadian?
Ernest Hemingway back in Paris in 1924, having made good on his escape from Toronto, and the Star, the year before. Universal Images Group via Getty Images
It may sound implausible. But I don’t think it is completely absurd. Hemingway lived in this city twice, by choice. He worked for this newspaper for most of four years, as a cub feature writer, a foreign correspondent and finally a full-time staffer for the Daily Star. Some of his most famous fictional stories were spun out from real events he covered first for the paper. There’s no reason why, if he had enjoyed his second stint, Hemingway couldn’t have kept that relationship alive, travelling out to Europe from a Toronto home to bring back stories of the Siege of Madrid, the Allied landing on D-Day and the birth of the nuclear age, all while falling deeper for the natural world of his adopted home: the snows of Mount Logan, the green hills of Cape Breton, the old men fishing in Masset, B.C.
(If you doubt somehow that the Canadian wilderness could inspire great literature, I invite you to read Ondaatje’s lesser-known poems set in Ontario cottage country.)
But of course, that isn’t what happened. Ernest, Hadley and baby John (aka “Bumby”) fled Canada in January 1924, departing by train from the same Union Station that Ondaatje would make pivotal to Patrick Lewis in his fictional 1923. “The train station was a palace, its niches and caverns an intimate city,” Ondaatje wrote about Lewis’s arrival. “He spoke out his name and it struggled up in a hollow echo and was lost in the high air of Union Station. No one turned. They were in the belly of a whale.”
It seems inevitable now that Hemingway would leave, that after four horrible months the whale would spit him back to Paris (via New York). He’s Ernest Hemingway. He had to get drunk with F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Left Bank. (Who else, after all, but Hemingway would have examined Fitzgerald’s penis in the bathroom at Michaud’s?)
But history always looks inevitable in retrospect. And having examined Hemingway’s letters from his Toronto years, I’ve come to believe that it is entirely possible he could have stayed in this city. Barring that, I think it is close to likely he would have come back again after departing Paris a second time (with a second pregnant wife) in 1928.
For all the mythology and lore, Hemingway lived most of his life in North America, in places like Ketchum, Key West, Florida and the Folly Ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming. He was no lifelong Parisian. His relationship to the city was like my friend Grant’s to Korea: It was a place he lived a few years in his 20s and he never quite got over after coming home.
No, the reason Hemingway never chose Toronto again wasn’t because he hated the city (or loved Europe above all). His letters, with a few colourful exceptions (he did once tell Pound that Canada was “the fistulated a——-e of the father of seven among Nations”) make that pretty clear. It was because he really, really hated his boss at the Toronto Daily Star.
Harry Comfort Hindmarsh was that most Toronto of things in the business world: someone’s kid, or in his case, kid-in-law. Hindmarsh was married to the daughter of Joseph “Holy Joe” Atkinson, the Star’s legendary owner. He ruled over the newsroom at this paper for more than 40 years, including those four telling months in 1923. To say that Hemingway loathed him would be an understatement. Hemingway worked for him for a single winter and openly hated him for the rest of his life.
In the late 1930s, when Star staffers were trying to organize a newspaper guild (the precursor to today’s Star newsroom union) Hemingway sent his former colleagues a cheque for $200 and a long letter urging them to “beat Hindmarsh.” He added that he’d still welcome the chance “to take a swing at” his old boss. Even his “fistulated a——-hole” letter to Pound came in the wake of a massive fight with Hindmarsh and seems, in context, more about his boss specifically than it was about Canadians in general.
(The only obviously Canadian character in “The Sun Also Rises,” the novel Hemingway wrote immediately after leaving Toronto, is the likeable socialite “Mrs. Braddocks.” “She was a Canadian,” Hemingway wrote, “and had all their easy social graces.”)
When Hemingway first worked for the Star, in 1920, he reported to the weekend magazine. He wrote “features,” often creative scene- and character-driven pieces that he pitched and produced himself on his own timeline. As a foreign correspondent in Europe between 1921 and 1923, Hemingway was essentially forced by distance and technology to decide on his own assignments. But back in Toronto, Hindmarsh pencilled him into the daily paper. That meant back-breaking days of non-stop chasing on stories Hemingway thought beneath his skills.
Hindmarsh, several historians have noted, seemed bent on crushing Hemingway. That wasn’t unusual. The “Hindmarsh treatment” was legendary at the Star. “It was Hindmarsh’s method to break in any new man by ‘putting him in harness’ — testing his endurance until he quit, cracked up, was fired or landed in a detox centre,” Hemingway scholar (and longtime Star staffer) William Burrill wrote in his book “Hemingway: The Toronto Years.”
In his first months back in Canada, Hindmarsh had Hemingway working 19-hour days filing stories from all over the province. He had no time to work on his fiction and no energy for any fun. “Ernest is distracted by the job … and is also greatly overworked,” Hadley wrote in a letter to Hemingway’s parents that fall. “So many trips, no sleep and countless unimportant assignments.”
The breaking point for Hemingway came that October, when Hindmarsh dispatched him to New York to cover a tour by former British prime minister David Lloyd George. As a result of the assignment, Hemingway missed Bumby’s birth. When he returned to the city, Hemingway rushed directly to the hospital instead of checking in at the newsroom, earning him a next-day tirade from Hindmarsh. That dressing down so enraged the young Hemingway that he soon decided to quit not just the Star, but all of Canada, for good. “(A)ll work done by me from now on would be done with the most utter contempt for (Hindmarsh) and all his bunch of masturbating mouthed associates,” he wrote to Pound shortly afterward.
Hemingway held on at the Star until Dec. 26, just long enough to collect his Christmas bonus. His last act in Toronto was to throw a wedding party for his friend and colleague Jimmy Cowan. He held it in his family’s now-empty apartment near Cedarvale Park. (That building, now known as “The Hemingway” still stands on Bathurst Street, just north of St. Clair Avenue.)
Hemingway’s relationship to this city, though pained at the time, still endures. There’s a reason the Hemingway Conference is being held in Toronto. But looking back on it, more than a century later, I can’t help but see Hemingway in Toronto as a missed opportunity for both sides.
Ernest Hemingway’s Star files provide a hint of what was to come
If he’d had a better boss, I really do believe Hemingway might have stayed, at least for that whole year and maybe longer. I don’t buy the idea that he never would have written “The Sun Also Rises,” that we wouldn’t have “Hemingway” as we know him today. He was too driven, too ambitious. His formative Paris years were the ones between 1920 and 1923. With a better, less taxing schedule, he would have produced literature in this city. Who knows, with a solid home base, he might even have produced more of it. He might have shaped this city and this country and been shaped by them in turn. Hemingway, after all, only wrote one decent book after turning 40 (“The Old Man and the Sea,” published in 1952). Ondaatje didn’t produce a single novel until his 43rd year. Who knows what a Canadian Hemingway might have produced given longer, more peaceable years?
On the other hand, maybe that’s just the reporter in me. Like anyone who has done this job long enough, I look at editors like the ancient Greeks looked at their gods: For good or evil, they control our fates. They shape our lives.
Harry Hindmarsh certainly had something of the Greek god in him. Capricious, uncaring and all-powerful, he ruled over this newsroom until the day he died. (Literally. He had heart attack in his office in 1956.)
Where Hemingway’s legacy lingers in Toronto: a walking tour
Yes, he beat Hemingway in 1923. He had his victory then. But it remains to be seen who had the last laugh. When Hindmarsh died, Pierre Berton said “he was considered the greatest newspaperman in Canada.” Today, almost anyone who has heard his name has like heard it as a punchline. Harry Hindmarsh: the newspaper editor so blind he couldn’t see the talent in Ernest Hemingway, the writer who would ride newspaper-style prose all the way to the Nobel Prize.
Richard Warnica is a Toronto-based senior opinion writer for the Star. Reach him via email: rwarnica@thestar.ca.
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