In a 1958 interview with The Paris Review, Ernest Hemingway said that he rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms “thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.” He was asked what had stumped him. He answered: “Getting the words right.” In 2012 his publisher, Scribner, printed an edition with 47 alternate endings found in his papers.
The line “The first draft of anything is shit” is often credited to Hemingway. It comes from Arnold Samuelson, who spent ten months with him in 1934. Samuelson’s memoir appeared in 1984, three years after Samuelson’s death. Quote Investigator finds the account plausible, but says the long delay “does not inspire a high degree of confidence.”