In his remarks to the Congress of American Writers in 1937, Ernest Hemingway addressed the audience with the bold declaration that ‘There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. […] [F]ascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under fascism.’ Fighting fascism in the 1930s, for many of the world’s most influential writers, was not simply a political or ideological battle – it was a symbolic struggle for integrity, freedom, and liberty under threat of intellectual enslavement. Hemingway was not alone in believing that writers were obliged to be ‘good’ through an active critique of fascist ideologies.