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What Everyone Forgets About Ernest Hemingway
His main achievement gets overlooked amid his tales of exploits like big-game hunting and fishing
Ernest Hemingway is American literature’s polarizer-in-chief. To his fans he is the great Nobel laureate who gave the country some of its finest novels and pioneered a bold style of writing that stripped fiction down to its underwear. To his critics he is a macho blowhard whose fame comes less from literary skill than from his romanticized portrayals of women and of stereotypically masculine activities like bullfighting and big-game hunting and fishing.
My view of Hemingway falls into a DMZ between the two warring camps. I agree with the scholars who say that he wrote America’s two best war novels, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and that as the country’s fifth Nobel laureate in literature, he was a worthy successor to №4, William Faulkner.
But Hemingway’s critics have a point. His influence hasn’t been entirely benign, and time has tended to obscure his main legacy: He broke down the wall between journalism and literature.
Hemingway worked early in his career for the Kansas City Star and later as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, and when he began writing…
