BiblioVault - Books about Hemingway

Faulkner and Hemingway

Biography of a Literary Rivalry

Joseph Fruscione

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

In the first book of its kind, Joseph Fruscione examines the contentious relationship of two titans of American modernism—William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. At times, each voiced a shared literary and professional respect; at other times, each thought himself the superior craftsman and spoke of the other disparagingly. Their rivalry was rich, nuanced, and vexed, embodying various attitudes—one-upmanship, respect, criticism, and praise. Their intertextual contest—what we might call their modernist dialectic—was manifested textually through their fiction, nonfiction, letters, Nobel Prize addresses, and spoken remarks.

Their intertextual relationship was highly significant for both authors: it was unusual for the reclusive Faulkner to engage so directly and so often with a contemporary, and for the hypercompetitive Hemingway to admit respect for—and possible inferiority to—a rival writer. Their joint awareness spawned an influential, allusive, and sparring intertext in which each had a psychocompetitive hold on the other. Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry—part analytical study, part literary biography—illustrates how their artistic paths and performed masculinities clashed frequently, as the authors measured themselves against each other and engendered a mutual psychological influence.

Although previous scholarship has noted particular flare-ups and textual similarities, most of it has tended to be more implicit in outlining the broader narrative of Faulkner and Hemingway as longtime rivals. Building on such scholarship, Faulkner and Hemingway offers a more overt study of how these authors’ published and archival work traces a sequence of psychological influence, cross-textual reference, and gender performance over some three decades.

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Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties

Ronald Berman

University of Alabama Press, 2002

A noted scholar offers fresh ways of looking at two legendary American authors.

Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway came into their own in the 1920s and did some of their best writing during that decade. In a series of interrelated essays, Ronald Berman considers an array of novels and short stories by both authors within the context of the decade's popular culture, philosophy, and intellectual history. As Berman shows, the thought of Fitzgerald and Hemingway went considerably past the limits of such labels as the Jazz Age or the Lost Generation.

Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway were avid readers, alive to the intellectual currents of their day, especially the contradictions and clashes of ideas and ideologies. Both writers, for example, were very much concerned with the problem of untenable belief—and also with the need to believe. In this light, Berman offers fresh readings of such works as Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and Hemingway's "The Killers," A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises. Berman invokes the thinking of a wide range of writers in his considerations of these texts, including William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Walter Lippman, and Edmund Wilson.

Berman's essays are driven and connected by a focused line of inquiry into Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's concerns with dogma both religious and secular, with new and old ideas of selfhood,and, particularly in the case of Hemingway, with the way we understand, explain, and transmit experience.

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Hemingway

Kenneth Lynn

Harvard University Press, 1995

Ernest Hemingway was a mythic figure of overt masculinity and vibrant literary genius. He lived life on an epic scale, presenting to the world a character as compelling as the fiction he created. But behind it all lurked an insecure, troubled man. In this immensely powerful and revealing study, Kenneth S. Lynn explores the many tragic facets that both nurtured Hemingway’s work and eroded his life. Masterfully written, Hemingway brings to life the writer whose desperate struggle to exorcise his demons produced some of the greatest American fiction of this century.

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Hemingway and the Black Renaissance

Edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and Charles Scruggs

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

Hemingway and the Black Renaissance, edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and Charles Scruggs, explores a conspicuously overlooked topic: Hemingway’s wide-ranging influence on writers from the Harlem Renaissance to the present day. An observable who’s who of black writers—Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Chester Himes, Alex la Guma, Derek Walcott, Gayl Jones, and more—cite Hemingway as a vital influence. This inspiration extends from style, Hemingway’s minimalist art, to themes of isolation and loneliness, the dilemma of the expatriate, and the terrifying experience of living in a time of war. The relationship, nevertheless, was not unilateral, as in the case of Jean Toomer’s 1923 hybrid, short-story cycle Cane, which influenced Hemingway’s collage-like 1925 In Our Time.

Just as important as Hemingway’s influence, indeed, is the complex intertextuality, the multilateral conversation, between Hemingway and key black writers. The diverse praises by black writers for Hemingway in fact signify that the white author’s prose rises out of the same intensely American concerns that their own writings are formed on: the integrity of the human subject faced with social alienation, psychological violence, and psychic disillusionment. An understanding of this literary kinship ultimately initiates not only an appreciation of Hemingway’s stimulus but also a perception of an insistent black presence at the core of Hemingway’s writing.

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Hemingway and Women

Female Critics and the Female Voice

Lawrence R. Broer

University of Alabama Press, 2003

Female scholars reevaluate gender and the female presence in the life and work of one of America’s foremost writers

Ernest Hemingway has often been criticized as a misogynist because of his portrayal of women. But some of the most exciting Hemingway scholarship of recent years has come from women scholars who challenge traditional views of Hemingway and women. The essays in this collection range from discussions of Hemingway’s famous heroines Brett Ashley and Catherine Barkley to examinations of the central role of gender in his short stories and in the novel The Garden of Eden. Other essays address the real women in Hemingway’s life—those who cared for him, competed with him, and, ultimately, helped to shape his art. While Hemingway was certainly influenced by traditional perceptions of women, these essays show that he was also aware of the struggle of the emerging new woman of his time. Making this gender struggle a primary concern of his fiction, these critics argue, Hemingway created women with strength, depth, and a complexity that readers are only beginning to appreciate.

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Hemingway in Italy

Richard Owen

Haus Publishing, 2017

Ernest Hemingway is most often associated with Spain and Cuba, but Italy was equally important in his life and work. Hemingway in Italy, the first full-length book exploring Hemmingway’s penchant for Italy, offers a lively account of the many visits Hemingway made throughout his life to Italian locales, including Sicily, Genoa, Rapallo, Cortina, and Venice.

In evocative prose, complemented by a rich selection of historical images, Richard Owen takes us on a tour through Hemingway’s Italy. He describes how Hemingway first visited the country of the Latins during World War I, an experience that set the scene for A Farewell to Arms. Then after World War II, it was in Italy that he found inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees. Again and again, the Italian landscape—from the Venetian lagoon to the Dolomites and beyond—deeply affected one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Hemingway in Italy demonstrates that Italy stands alongside Spain as a key influence on Hemingway’s work—and why the Italians themselves hold Hemingway and his writing close to their hearts.

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Hemingway on Love

By Robert W. Lewis, Jr.

University of Texas Press, 1965

Love was a central theme of Ernest Hemingway’s major works. And although his passages on sexual love and on romantic love may be widely remembered and frequently quoted, says Robert W. Lewis in this scholarly and detailed consideration, Hemingway’s later work revealed his ultimate belief that brotherly love was the supreme love of mankind. Eros, Hemingway concluded, was a neutral value, neither good nor bad in itself, but yet capable of complementing agape in giving man pleasure.

By examining the forms and essences of the various kinds of love, Hemingway worked out an explanation and tentative solution to the troubles of the human condition. The tradition of romantic love that had prevailed in Western literature had challenged sexual love and brotherly love and had been confused with them since the Middle Ages. Hemingway’s early work was destructive of romantic love, says Lewis; the work of his middle career was crucial in his exploration for the supreme love and the means to whatever peace and happiness man may achieve. By the time he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, his ethic was formulated and he could write conclusively of the trial and lesson of love in Western civilization in a way that reflected his discovery that true love must be a reciprocal blend of eros and agape between man and woman, man and man, and man and his world.

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Hemingway

The Writer’s Art of Self-Defense

Jackson J. Benson

University of Minnesota Press, 1970

Hemingway was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In a close critical analysis of five of Ernest Hemingway's novels and a number of his most important short stories, Professor Benson provides a fascinating new view of his work. The novels discussed are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and into the Trees,and the Old Man and the Sea.

Hemingway's art of self-defense, which Professor Benson refers to in his subtitle, was, as he demonstrates in his perceptive criticism, the writer's use of style and technique to attack the sentimentalities which were Hemingway's own weakness. Emotion was central to the task which Hemingway defined for himself, Professor Benson explains, and a critical appraisal of his work must, therefore, focus particularly on the ways in which he dealt with and expressed emotion.

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Translating Modernism

Fitzgerald and Hemingway

Ronald Berman

University of Alabama Press, 2009

In Translating Modernism Ronald Berman continues his career-long study of the ways that intellectual and philosophical ideas informed and transformed the work of America’s major modernist writers.

Here Berman shows how Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrestled with very specific intellectual, artistic, and psychological influences, influences particular to each writer, particular to the time in which they wrote, and which left distinctive marks on their entire oeuvres. Specifically, Berman addresses the idea of "translating" or "translation"—for Fitzgerald the translation of ideas from Freud, Dewey, and James, among others; and for Hemingway the translation of visual modernism and composition, via Cézanne.

Though each writer had distinct interests and different intellectual problems to wrestle with, as Berman demonstrates, both had to wrestle with transmuting some outside influence and making it their own.

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