Millions of people who have never died before will be killed
Misquoted — Hemingway wrote ‘men are dying this year who have never died before’Ernest Hemingway1899–1961 · American novelist, short-story writer & journalist
The documented line is from a 1930 letter Hemingway wrote to his friend Henry Strater: “He advised us all to be careful as men are dying this year who have never died before” — and the “he” is not Hemingway but his Key West fishing companion Edward ‘Bra’ Saunders, whom Hemingway credited every time he used it. The popular wording drifted twice over: first into the widely shared “People are dying who have never died before,” then into the apocalyptic “Millions of people who have never died before will be killed,” which no documented source contains.
“Millions of people who have never died before will be killed” Ernest Hemingway, letter to Henry Strater, 1930, quoting his friend Edward "Bra" Saunders. The popular version, "Millions of people who have never died before will be killed," is not what Hemingway wrote, and it is not from any film.
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Evoking the world of Ernest Hemingway — American novelist, short-story writer & journalist. Theme: "Millions of people who have never died before will be killed". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
What was actually written
Work
Letter to Henry Strater, 1930
Written by
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
Credited by Hemingway to
Edward “Bra” Saunders, a Key West boat captain who introduced him to game fishing — a real person, not a character
Popular wording
“Millions of people who have never died before will be killed” — found in no film, transcript or text
He advised us all to be careful as men are dying this year who have never died before.
Letter, not screenplay
Hemingway is relaying a warning from his friend Bra Saunders, not making the observation himself — the “he” that opens the sentence is Saunders. Per Sandra Spanier, Hemingway used the line at least twice more, in 1939 and in late 1940 or early 1941, crediting Saunders each time.
There is no film. Repeated searches for the popular wording as a screen line return no movie, screenplay, transcript or writer — only the fact-check cluster about the phrase’s political misattribution. Wikiquote’s Ernest Hemingway page ↗, checked in raw wikitext, does not list the line in any section, and Quote Investigator has no entry on it.
The earliest documented use is a letter, in 1930.AFP, reporting Sandra Spanier of the Hemingway Letters Project ↗, gives Hemingway’s sentence to Henry Strater in full: “He advised us all to be careful as men are dying this year who have never died before” — the words credited to boat captain Edward “Bra” Saunders.
Then it drifted, twice. The circulating form shortened to “People are dying who have never died before” and was pinned on Trump in March 2020, Biden a week later ↗, and Greene in 2021. The escalation to millions killed appears to be a further embellishment with no documented source — an observation, not a sourced claim.
US public domain turns on publication, not composition — and although Hemingway wrote this letter in 1930, private correspondence was not published in his lifetime. The letter reached print only in modern scholarly and selected editions well after 1930, so the pre-1931 public-domain cutoff does not reach it and the text remains in copyright to the Hemingway estate and its publishers. We have not independently verified which edition first printed this particular letter, so no edition, editor or page is asserted here.
Fact-check
Who gets blamed for it
This line has spent a decade being put in the mouths of people who never said it. The pattern is always the same: the phrase reads as a malapropism, so it gets assigned to whichever public figure the sharer already considers a fool. It is also, less obviously, misattributed to Hemingway himself — he told everyone it wasn’t his.
The follow-on version, one week laterJoe Biden Pants on Fire
By 24 March 2020 the same joke had been reassigned, as “People who have never died before are now dying from coronavirus.” PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire ↗ — the clearest proof that the phrase attaches to a reputation, not to a speaker.
✕
The 2021 versionMarjorie Taylor Greene Never said it
In June 2021 the line was attributed to the congresswoman. Lead Stories found no record of her saying it ↗ and traced the wording back to a letter Hemingway wrote to a friend in 1930, quoting another friend.
✕
The origin itselfErnest Hemingway, as the coiner He credited someone else
✓Nobody famous said “Millions of people who have never died before will be killed.” A Key West boat captain named Bra Saunders made a joke; Hemingway liked it enough to put it in a 1930 letter to Henry Strater ↗, in these words: “He advised us all to be careful as men are dying this year who have never died before.”
Context
A fishing-dock joke that became a pandemic punchline
The line began as gallows humour on a Key West dock. By Sandra Spanier’s account to AFP, Hemingway first put it on paper in a 1930 letter to the painter Henry Strater, relaying a warning from the boat captain Edward ‘Bra’ Saunders — and he used it at least twice more, in 1939 and in late 1940 or early 1941, crediting Saunders each time. Spanier notes the register changed as Hemingway aged: what started as a joke came to carry sorrow and regret. His fourth wife, Mary, recorded in her memoir that he would repeat the saying too often.
It reached most people ninety years later wearing someone else’s face. In March 2020, as COVID-19 briefings began, a tweet put “People are dying who have never died before” in Donald Trump’s mouth, dated 3/18/20. He never said it. Within a week the same words were being attributed to Joe Biden; by June 2021 to Marjorie Taylor Greene. The phrase had become a snowclone — a template that reads as a malapropism from whichever politician you already find ridiculous. The escalated form now circulating, with its millions killed, is the end point of that drift: a joke about mortality rewritten as a prophecy of slaughter.
Hemingway didn’t coin it either — he credited a Key West boat captain, every single time.
Why the wording matters here
The humour of the original depends entirely on its restraint. “Men are dying this year who have never died before” is a deadpan tautology — the absurdity sits quietly in the sentence and the reader finds it. “Millions of people who have never died before will be killed” forecloses the joke by shouting it: the scale (millions), the agency (killed) and the tense (will be) are all imported, and none of them are in the source.
The drift also flipped the phrase’s function. In Hemingway’s hands it was a private aside, passed between friends and eventually freighted with real grief. In its viral form it exists only to make a named public figure look stupid — which is why every fact-check of it has had to begin by establishing that the named figure never said it.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1899–1961 · American novelist, short-story writer & journalist
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and journalist whose spare, declarative prose — in The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea — reshaped twentieth-century fiction and won him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. He spent much of the 1930s in Key West, where the boat captains and fishing guides he drank and worked with supplied him with a steady stock of local turns of phrase. This particular joke was one of them: Hemingway repeated it for over a decade, in letters and in conversation, but he consistently presented it as someone else’s line rather than his own.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Ernest Hemingway to Henry Strater, 1930, quoting Edward “Bra” Saunders: “He advised us all to be careful as men are dying this year who have never died before.” Earliest documented use as reported by AFP on the authority of Sandra Spanier, General Editor, The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (Cambridge University Press), whose Volume 4 covers 1929–1931. Exact edition and page of the letter not independently verified.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Millions of people who have never died before will be killed’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/millions-of-people-who-have-never-died-before-will-be-killed