ALL good journalism is a mixture of discovery tempered by experience. This week's cover story on camping we hope is such a blending, combining a writer's enthusiastic findings with the knowledgeability contributed by some old hands.

Associate Editor Jesse Birnbaum is strictly from Eastern urb and suburb, but went into training for the story by camping out at Jackson Hole, Wyo., and some of his delight rubs off in the telling. Among correspondents who supplied material for the story are a number of old campers. Kenneth Froslid of the Chicago bureau, a camper since the age of five, originally proposed the cover after camping out on an 8,200-mile cross-country Volkswagen tour with his wife. He has since graduated to the amenities of an Apache Chief camping trailer. Bob Wood, who filed from San Francisco, makes backpacking trips into the Yosemite, bearing a 35-lb. pack, catching trout for food, and using a passing stream as his refrigerator. He likes to arrive in the hills at nightfall, sleeping out before setting forth in the morning, as the easiest way to acclimatize himself to the altitude. Denver Bureau Chief Barron Beshoar, a veteran camper, made a 2,660-mile circle of campsites gathering material, and now, to get away from all those who are getting away from it all, is setting off with a friend on a nine-day packhorse trip into primitive country in the Grand Tetons.

THE writing career of Ernest Hemingway, whose life and death is reported in a comprehensive story in BOOKS this week, roughly coincides with TIME'S own lifetime, and I thought that you might be interested not only in our coverage of the well-known Hemingway years (he was on TIME'S cover in 1937 and again as a Nobel prizewinner in 1954) but in how the young TIME greeted the young Hemingway's advent.

In 1926, when TIME was just over two years old, it reviewed Hemingway's first collection of short stories, In Our Time:

"Here is a writer, a young new U.S. writer, who instinctively differentiates between the hawk of living and the handsaw of existing. Make no mistake, Ernest Hemingway is somebody; a new honest, un-'literary' transcriber of life--a Writer."

The same year came The Sun Also Rises:

"Now his first novel is published and while his writing has acquired only a few affectations, his interests appear to have grown soggy with much sitting around sloppy cafe tables . . . Experts may proclaim this book a masterpiece of sex-frustration psychology."

A few months later in 1927, with the short stories of Men Without Women, enthusiasm returned:

"Totally objective, they are as clear and crisp and perfectly shaped as icicles, as sharp as splinters of glass. Seldom if ever before has a writer been able to cut so deeply into life with the 26 carving tools of the English alphabet."

In 1929 came A Farewell to Arms:

"Fulfills the prophecies that his most excited admirers have made about Ernest Hemingway."

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