How long do you think it took Hemingway to write Old Man and the Sea?

[Indian Boy]

I'm always curious to think how long it took certain writers to actually write their books. I just finished reading Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea' for the fifth time, and each time I read the book, it surprises me how simple it was written and how quick a person can finish the book. So that leads to my question, how long do you think it took Hemingway to write 'The Old Man and the Sea'?

You know what, just to make this question more interesting, how long do you think it took Melville to write, 'Moby Dick'?

[Brad Coelho]

With regards to time to completion, I don't know what was more impressive: Dostoevsky cranking out Crime & Punishment in months 'on demand,' or Joyce's 2 decades of 'work in progress' on Finnegan's wake?

[Dinkleberry2010]

Any writer who takes twenty years to write a book is just not writing on the book very often.

[dfloyd]

banana daquiris and Cuba Libres.

[mortalterror]

About 55 years.

[JuniperWoolf]

Sort of related topic: I heard that it took RLS a day to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because he was all coke'd-out. Whether true or not, that makes a good anecdote.

[dfloyd]

being a RLS fan of some years, I have learned quite a bit about Stevenson just from the introductions to the many novels I have of his works. First of all, Stevenson was a consumptive; that is, he had tuberculosis. He was subject to extreme coughing and hemoraging; he was bedridden many times before his death, so I doubt if he ever took cocaine, but he might have taken laudanum, an opium derivative used as a sleep enhancement and obtained without out a prescription in his day.

This makes some sense since he awoke one day after dreaming of the outline of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He spent a couple of days wondering around trying to get a plot together in his mind. When he did, he spent the next three days sequestered and turned out the novella of 30,000 words. He gave it to his wife to read, and she castigated him for writing a piece which was more sensationalism than literature. He burned the manuscript so that he could not refer to it, and set about writing the second manuscript. He finished this second novella in another three days. This in itself was a prodigous task: 60,000 words of creative effort in six days. And this is how the story often just referred to as Jekyll and Hyde came into being.

Stevenson was a fantastically talented writer who wrote under the severe condition of ill health. Eventually, he travelled to American Somao with his wife, who was also his nurse. There he died, ending a fantastic literary career.