The Hemingway section of BMV Books on Bloor Street West is a straight shot through the front doors, up two steps, and to the back. The collection is impressive: “The Torrents of Spring” “Death in the Afternoon” and Hemingway’s short stories dominate the three rows, with one copy of “The Sun Also Rises” and “By-Line”, an anthology of Hemingway’s journalism, mixed in.

Mike Murray, the manager at BMV, says that even as the years go by and as new authors crop up, Hemingway’s books remain popular with his customers, partly in thanks to the English literature students who swamp the section at the beginning of each semester.

It’s not surprising, Murray says. “With his sparse style, there’s still something to learn there.”

That famously sparse style, described by novelist John Dos Passos as a combination of “cablese and the King James Bible,” would take years to refine, perfected only after pages of letters, literary writing, and, yes, dispatches for the Star.

Hemingway’s first bylined Star story, published March 6, 1920, shows another Hemingway entirely. “A Free Shave” is a whimsical, thousand-word tour through a barber college on Queen Street West, detailing Hemingway’s cut and shave courtesy of a bumbling novice barber.

“If you want to save $5.60 a month on shaves and haircuts, go to the barber college, but take your courage with you,” writes a 20-year-old Hemingway. “For a visit to the barber college requires the cold, naked valour of the man who walks clear-eyed to death. If you don’t believe it, go to the beginner’s department of the barber’s college and offer yourself for a free shave. I did.”

It was the first of around 200 Hemingway pieces to pop up in the Star — some bylined, some not — from 1920 to 1924. Over that stretch, Hemingway filed stories from Chicago, New York, Paris, and beyond, slotting in as the paper’s European correspondent and then as a staff reporter based out of Toronto.

The tone in his first piece is loose, light, and jokey — hardly resembling his more serious work later on. And although Hemingway complained to his then-wife, Hadley that journalism was getting in the way of his literary writing, his stint as a reporter gave him the opportunity to refine his distinct style, says Randy Boyagoda, author and professor of English, and principal of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto.

“In technical terms, journalism was a significant part of what made Hemingway the writer that he was,” Boyagoda told the Star. “He was writing on deadline in contexts where he couldn’t be as elaborate as he wanted…for that reason, his experience in print journalism was really important to the technical side of his famous style.”

Hemingway himself said that journalism forced him “to learn how to write a simple declarative sentence.” This, Hemingway said, “was useful to anyone.” The Nobel Prize winner remembered this early lesson, and occasionally used his journalism as inspiration for later work.

For example, the final chapter of “A Moveable Feast,” Hemingway’s posthumously-released “memoir” of 1920s Paris, lifts parts of a Star Weekly piece he wrote in 1923, according to William White’s “By-Line.”

And according to William Burrill, the author of “Hemingway in Toronto”, a Star Weekly article from June 3, 1922 on canoeing in Algonquin Park “in many ways, suggests the style of later Hemingway short stories such as “Big Two-Hearted River.”

Though BMV’s Mike Murray isn’t exactly a fan of Hemingway — “I haven’t read him in 30 years,” he said — the author still has a loyal fanbase in Toronto.

André Alexis, the Giller Prize-winning author of “Fifteen Dogs,” told the Star that Hemingway’s style was “crucial” to him early on.

“I feel like I encountered its echo, first in the work of Norman Levine, the greatest writer to come out of Ottawa. So that, when I read Hemingway’s work seriously for the first time, I had already accepted — and loved — its sparseness, its creative suppression, the way it allowed place for the reader to ‘fill things out,’ to create along with the writer,” Alexis says.

“His style is easy to parody… as was that of his mentor, Gertrude Stein. But I much prefer it to the elaborations of, say, Nabokov or, worse, Martin Amis, the ones addicted to Sunday language or relentless novelty.”

When Hemingway left Toronto for Paris in January 1924, his colleagues at the Star were perplexed. He had a top slot at one of Canada’s best papers and was getting paid handsomely, raking in around $75 a week.

Shouldn’t it be surprising, then, that Hemingway left Toronto?

“I find it surprising he even came here,” said Nick Mount, an English professor at University of Toronto. “Given the other locales he travelled to: Cuba, Paris — it is puzzling.”

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Chris Bateman, acting manager of Plaques and Public Education at Heritage Toronto, told the Star that nowadays, “Toronto would be unrecognizable to Hemingway.”

“In 1920, the population was about 630,000 people...downtown hummed with factories and manufacturing operations during the day and fell silent each night. Now, there’s almost three million of us, we’re ethnically diverse, and we lead the way in creating an inclusive and diverse city that respects its heritage,” Bateman wrote over email.

Hemingway wouldn’t recognize the city, sure, but would he like Toronto?

“I think Hemingway would love it here now,” writes Bateman. “It’s much easier to get a drink when you want one, even if LCBO still closes early on Sunday.”

Ted Fraser is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star’s radio room in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @ted_fraser