Before finding celebrity as an author, including his 1954 Nobel Prize, Ernest M. Hemingway honed his craft as a journeyman reporter. In the spring of 1923, as a special correspondent for the Toronto Star, he travelled to the occupied Ruhr Valley where he produced a series of 10 articles, collected here as Dispatches from the Ruhr. In them, he explores the French political system and its role in the decision to occupy the Ruhr Valley militarily, in an effort to collect on unsustainable war reparations. In addition, he examines the suffering of its ordinary citizens, as conditions there led to a progressive loss of confidence in the Wiemar Republic; its economic collapse under the weight of hyper-inflation; and, ultimately, to the rise of Nazism. It is worth reading as both a case study on the unintended consequences of military occupation and a master class in the development of Hemingway’s characteristic prose style.
