Hemingway never published this sentence. It survives in exactly one place: With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba, the memoir of Arnold Samuelson, who worked as Hemingway’s deck hand on the Pilar for ten months from 1934. Samuelson’s manuscript went unpublished in his lifetime and reached print in 1984, half a century after the conversation it records — which is why Quote Investigator calls the attribution plausible rather than proven.
“The first draft of anything is shit” Attributed to Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961). Earliest documented appearance: Arnold Samuelson, "With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba" (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 11, recording a conversation during Samuelson's ten months working for Hemingway, 1934–35. Quote Investigator calls the attribution plausible but not confirmed. Verified via Quotle.info, 4 Aug 2026.
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In context
Evoking the world of Ernest Hemingway — American novelist, short-story writer and Nobel laureate. Theme: "The first draft of anything is shit". 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.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "The first draft of anything is shit". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The only source there is
Recorded in
With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba
Recorded by
Arnold Samuelson, Hemingway’s deck hand on the Pilar
Conversation
During Samuelson’s ten months with Hemingway, 1934–35 — QI dates and locates the job, not the exchange
First published
Random House, New York, 1984 (posthumous) — page 11
Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit.
as recorded by Arnold Samuelson
Hemingway’s spoken advice as Samuelson set it down, transcribed verbatim from page 11 of the 1984 Random House edition by Quote Investigator ↗, which verified the passage on paper. The Marginalian ↗ quotes the same passage but drops “the first part of” — which turns rewriting the opening of A Farewell to Arms fifty times into rewriting the whole novel. We follow QI.
Quote Investigator ↗ is the anchor: it states that Hemingway died in 1961 and that the first published evidence of the remark known to QI appeared in the 1984 posthumous memoir With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba, cited to page 11, Random House, New York.
QI also sets out the chain of custody: Samuelson went to Key West in 1934, took the job as deck hand on the Pilar and worked with Hemingway for ten months; he died in 1981, and his daughter inherited the document and edited it for publication ↗, which happened in 1984.
Barry Popik ↗ reaches the same starting point independently and corroborates the next two links QI also records: the January 1985 Esquire (vol. 103, no. 1) reprint of the longer passage and the 1989 Safire and Safir anthology Words of Wisdom: More Good Advice at page 222.
The publication data checks out against the library record: Open Library ↗ lists With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba by Arnold Samuelson, Random House, New York, 1984, ISBN 0-394-53983-4, 183 pages.
The only text carrying this sentence is With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba, first published by Random House in 1984 — decades after the pre-1931 threshold for US public domain — so the memoir, including the passage quoted here, is in copyright. Who holds that copyright is a separate question we have not confirmed: the library record establishes the publisher and nothing more, so treat Random House and/or Samuelson’s estate as presumed holders and check the book’s copyright page before any commercial reuse. Hemingway’s own published work is a separate rights question again, and in any case this line appears in none of it.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What gets it wrong
Nobody is stealing this line from another writer — the problem is the confidence with which it is served. Three things get overstated every time it is posted.
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SourceNo Hemingway text of his own has been found carrying it — not the letters, not the interviews, not A Moveable Feastno such source
Quote Investigator ↗ finds no published evidence of the remark before the 1984 memoir, and Barry Popik’s citation trail ↗ starts in the same place, followed by the January 1985 Esquire reprint and the 1989 Safire and Safir anthology. Any citation that sends you to something Hemingway wrote himself is going beyond what either investigator can show.
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Wording“The first draft of everything is shit” variant
Quote Investigator lists this alongside “anything” and a bowdlerised “the first draft of anything is rubbish” among the versions in circulation — see the variants at the head of the QI entry ↗. The memoir’s wording is “anything.”
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ContextPosted as a standalone verdict on first drafts clipped
In the memoir it is the punchline to practical advice about revision — “Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing… You’ve got to work it over” — as quoted from the book by The Marginalian ↗. Stripped of that, it reads as fatalism rather than instruction.
✓The honest version: one witness, writing about a conversation in 1934, published in 1984 after his own death in 1981 — and Quote Investigator ↗ allows that Samuelson may well have written it down while it was fresh, while warning that the gap “does not inspire a high degree of confidence.”
Context
Why this one stuck
Every writing workshop in the English-speaking world runs on this sentence, and part of its power is the name attached: if the author of A Farewell to Arms thought his own openings were garbage, the rest of us can stop panicking. The trouble is that Hemingway published a great deal about writing and none of it contains this line. It reaches us through a young man who slept on a boat.
In 1934 Arnold Samuelson turned up in Key West wanting a literary tutor; Hemingway needed a deck hand for his new cabin cruiser Pilar and hired him for ten months. Samuelson wrote up the year and then shelved it. He died in 1981, his daughter inherited the manuscript and edited it for publication, and the book appeared from Random House in 1984 — the first time, so far as Quote Investigator ↗ can find, that these words appeared in print anywhere.
The most quoted thing Hemingway ever said about writing is a thing he never wrote down.
What Hemingway did put in writing
The sentiment is not out of character, and there is a documented Hemingway line in the same key. Quote Investigator quotes a letter he sent F. Scott Fitzgerald on 28 May 1934 — the same year Samuelson was on the boat — in which Hemingway writes: “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” That letter is in his own hand and is printed in the Carlos Baker–edited Selected Letters, per QI’s citation ↗.
So the idea is well attested. The famous eight-word version of it is not — it is one sentence in one memoir, and the man who wrote it down was dead before it was published.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1899–1961 · American novelist, short-story writer and Nobel laureate
Ernest Hemingway (born 21 July 1899, died 2 July 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist whose stripped-back prose reshaped twentieth-century fiction. He wrote The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, taking the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. In 1934 he bought the fishing boat Pilar — the boat that brought a young aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson into his orbit, and with him the only record of this line.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented appearance
Samuelson, Arnold. With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba. New York: Random House, 1984, p. 11. Identified by Quote Investigator as the first published evidence of the remark; the conversation it records falls within Samuelson's ten months working for Hemingway, 1934–35, which QI does not date or locate more precisely.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The first draft of anything is shit’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-first-draft-of-anything-is-shit/