Hemingway’s style left a deep imprint on the landscape of prose In the years after the First World War, the Young Man Who Lived and Loved Hard and Wrote Well revolutionized American literature. His prose was a symphony of short, strong, sonorous sentences. His heroes were men broken by the world but left “strong at the broken places.” His women were both strong and weak, and they were always very beautiful in their summer dresses. The Young Man Who Lived and Loved Hard and Wrote Well lied out of his mouth and told the truth out of his typewriter. He defined courage better than any writer ever had before. But he died a coward’s death by his own hand, his brains and blood staining the foyer of a lodge on the slopes of the Rockies one fine Sunday morning in July. This is the legend of Ernest Hemingway in 130 words, as he might have written it himself if he had been a minor character in one of his own novels. The doctor’s son from Oak Park, Ill., was so perfectly suited to the aborning literary age that perhaps only an education in a college English department could have kept him from becoming the most influential figure in 20th-century writing. Instead, Hemingway matriculated at age 18 at the Kansas City Star, where the style sheet instructed: “Use short sentences.
Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English.” They were rules he never forgot. He picked up other pointers from the King James Bible, from dead writers like Mark Twain and Stephen Crane, and from living luminaries such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, at whose feet he sat after becoming the Toronto Star’s mustachioed 22-year-old correspondent in Paris. For all that, the literary style he forged was startlingly original. The Victorian tradition, which still held sway in many quarters, dressed up prose in ornate finery to blunt the starkness of life. Hemingway stripped prose to its union suit to lay bare life’s futility. He found power in simplicity and poetry in the rhythm of ordinary speech. Mark Twain had begun the naturalistic rebellion against Romanticism four decades earlier, but it was Hemingway who finally cleared the adjective-clotted arteries of mainstream writing. The New York Times pronounced his short stories “fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean.” After publication of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926, a reviewer wrote in the Atlantic that Hemingway “writes as if he had never read anybody’s writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself.” Hemingway invented more than a style; he invented “the Hemingway hero.” Here too, he owed a debt to Twain.
The Essay on Hemingway vs. Faulkner writing styles
Throughout time, individual authors have crafted varying writing styles that portray the authors themselves and helps the reader to better understand the tone of the piece. During the early twentieth century, the upcoming of a new America created many talented writers that varied drastically in style. An author may choose to write in a realistic manor, such as Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner. ...
Nick Adams in numerous short stories, Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms (1929), Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1939), and other Hemingway heroes were Huckleberry Finn grown to manhood. They were American innocents negotiating the river of life wherever it took them: to Italy, to Spain, to Africa, to the Caribbean, wounded men laughing through the pain, sometimes risking their skins but never sacrificing their honor. It was a river into which countless writers would thrust their paddles. Hemingway’s oeuvre was not large, yet he became the great American water buffalo of stylists, his spoor spread by imitators across the landscape of prose from journalism to pulp fiction to literary novels. The Hemingway hero grew into a stock figure on the movie screen as well. But the most vivid and complex character Hemingway created was himself. The greatest terror the world held for him was a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter–or so he wished the world to believe. All his life he was gripped by a compulsion to demonstrate the magnitude of his cojones. He hunted lions in Africa, fished for marlin in the Caribbean, scouted for Nazi submarines with his yacht, aided the French Resistance in World War II, drank enough to fell a field army, and in Key West, his only longtime U.S. haunt, he was wont to invite patrons of Sloppy Joe’s to box with “Papa” (as he liked to be called).
The Essay on School: Meaning of Life and World
Imagine a world where everything you believe is true, is actually a TV Show. Now you’re in the world of Truman Burbank, an ‘average’ person whose entire life is broadcasted to the world. Christof the director of the Truman show states that “We accept the reality of the world in which we are presented. ” This is a key issue in “The Truman Show” but does it apply to our real lives? Do we question ...
Hemingway did something else to prove his prowess: He lied. Shamelessly. He claimed, for example, to have slept with the World War I spy Mata Hari (forgetting she had been shot before he reached Europe).
In a fragment of prose found among his papers after his death, he wrote: “It is not unnatural that the best writers are liars. A major part of their trade is to lie or invent. . . . Lying to themselves is harmful, but this is cleansed away by the writing of a true book.” Hemingway had four wives, cheating on each with the next in the line of succession. Despite his he-man airs, for nearly his entire adult life he had a spouse on hand to comfort him (of which he had much need, being so accident prone that most photos show a bandage on some part of his body).
He backbit friends and feuded with former mentors. Yet men and women alike craved his company, and not only because of his fame. Charisma poured off him. Like the heroes in his books, Hemingway seemed to bear some secret psychic wound. His heroic posturing lessened the pain, but the only true anesthetic was writing well. A writer is like a gold mine, he wrote in an unpublished musing. He must “exhaust the mine each time or he will sicken and die.” In 1954, two years after his lyrical masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. But his failing health soon sapped his writing skills. By 1961, his typewriter lay inert beneath his fingers. He reached for a new pain killer, a double-barreled shotgun. Realism vs. reality. Hemingway went to his grave at a time when growing numbers of intellectuals were convinced that the realistic novel as an art form might follow him. No longer did the literati talk of the Great American Novel–as they had since the Civil War–the single work that would synthesize the American experience. At the start of the 1960s, Philip Roth defined fiction’s challenge: Reality suddenly seemed more gripping than the conjurings of any writer’s imagination.
The Essay on Amazon Books and Writers
Miss Furr and Miss Keene has a reputation of being one of Gertrude Stein’s more controversial works. Originally published in 1922, the story tells of the lives of two women who live together. The story is written with a limited lexicon and contains the word “gay” which appears over a hundred times. It is purported to be one of the first coming out stories published, and through its ...
Many younger writers of “serious fiction” held back from painting the social panorama. They wrote stories of small scope or abandoned realism altogether for absurdism, fables, or other postmodern ventures. Journalism chose this juncture to invade literature’s turf. Hatching almost overnight like a brood of cicadas, the New Journalists commenced to feed on the carnival of 1960s America with a deafening buzz. Whether examining the sexual revolution, the Mafia, auto racing, racial strife, or the life of a celebrity, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, and many others tried to marry the literal truth of journalism and the psychological truth of fiction. They filled their novelistic narratives with true-life scenes, sharply observed sociological detail, and long snatches of dialogue. They tried to get inside their subjects’ heads in a way few journalists had had the cheek to do before. Wolfe, in particular, became for a time the most imitated writer since Hemingway. His prose crackled with irony and attitude and smarty-pants ?lan. He spewed out dots, dashes, and exclamation marks–!!!!!–as a blowtorch spews out sparks. Wolfe and Talese liberalized sartorial standards in a trade in which resembling an unmade bed was a traditional mark of authenticity.
Wolfe wore a white suit and swung a cane; Talese dressed like a Fifth Avenue dandy even when his only date was with his typewriter. No longer would journalists be content to be, in Wolfe’s word, the “lumpenproles” of the writing game while novelists sported aristocratic airs. Norman Mailer and Truman Capote became another type of literary cross-dresser. Already novelists, they merely took their shticks with them into journalism. Capote coined the term “nonfiction novel” for his In Cold Blood, a true-crime saga serialized in the New Yorker in 1965. Published in hard cover in 1966, it spawned a true-crime genre that henceforth would compete with fictional potboilers. By 1973, Wolfe was hooting that journalism–as practiced in New York, Esquire, Harper’s, other magazines, and in books–had “wipe[d] out the novel as literature’s main event.” On the campuses, meanwhile, deconstructionists, multiculturalists, and neo-Marxists were pulverizing the traditional mystique of the novel. Works of literature, long given succor and worshiped in academe as windows on beauty and moral truth, were now to be studied primarily as mere cultural artifacts produced by the prejudices, illusions, ethnic hubris, and economic or gender realities reigning at the time of their creation.
The Essay on Anglo Saxon Literature Pagan Time
It's said that literature brings to life, defines, and takes direction from historical period in which it were written, and this couldn't be further from the truth in the Anglo-Saxon's period. This start in 449 when the island of Britain was invaded by warlike Germanic people know as the Anglo and Saxons. The invader brought with them their pagan beliefs and tradition, which appear in a Anglo- ...
Not literature alone, but the entire print culture felt under siege in the last quarter of the century as electronic media proliferated. On the surface, the situation was not dire. Some magazines died, others were born. Some newspapers died, others were born. By the 1990s, 50,000 new books were being published each year in the United States–five times as many as when Scribner’s issued Hemingway’s first novel. Yet cries of panic arose. Alvin Kernan’s Death of Literature (1990), David Marc’s Bonfire of the Humanities (1995), and Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies (1995) resounded with apocalyptic gloom about the future of literacy. Partly, it was nostalgia and future shock. But what disturbed the dwindling partisans of the print culture most was the new lost generation–lost to literature. Kids’ language skills had sunk for three decades. Fewer and fewer read except when forced to. Opinion was divided on what the brave new world would bring. The pessimists saw an “electronic hive,” an addictive collective consciousness geared to shortened attention spans and ruinous to the reflectiveness, mental coherence, and sense of self that books had fostered in the cream of pre-electronic generations. The optimists saw a glorious new age of instant information and discourse, a coming surge of computer interactions that would bolster literacy and thinking skills and uncover new levels of human potential.
