John Steinbeck on Hemingway's Suicide

The first time we heard of Ernest Hemingway's death [1958] was a call from the London Daily Mail. I found it shocking. He had only one theme--only one. A man contends with the forces of the world, called fate, and meets them with courage. Surely a man has a right to remove his own life but you'll find no such possibility in any of Hemingway's heroes. The sad thing is that I think he would have hated accident much more than suicide. He was an incredibly vain man.

John Steinbeck in Writers At Work, Fourth Series, edited by George Plimpton, 1976