VIII

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World War II

“I have decided, or rather I decided several months before it started, or may be several years say, not to write propaganda in this war at all. I am willing to go to it and will send my kids to it and will give what money I have to it but I want to write just what I believe all the way through it and after it. It was the writers in the last war who wrote propaganda that finished themselves off that way. There is plenty of stuff that you believe absolutely that you can write which is useful enough without having to write propaganda . . . . If we are fighting for what we believe in we might as well always keep on believing in what we have believed, and for me this is to write nothing that I do not think is the absolute truth.”

—To Maxwell Perkins, Finca Vigía, Cuba,

May 30, 1942