Alex Moffat and Alec Baldwin on "Saturday Night Live" (Credit: NBC) In a December 1925 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway famously referred to war as “the best subject of all” for the way it “groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.” Though at the time Hemingway had not published much — on war or otherwise — war would indeed prove to be a ripe subject for the author.