Ernest Hemingway as cultural icon

Biographer Michael Reynolds has noted that although Hemingway's short fiction is what
changed American fiction, particularly in the way subsequent authors wrote dialogue, there are
people who venerate Hemingway who have never read Hemingway. Despite his reputation as a
serious artisthe received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, and his novels The Sun Also
Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) were included on a 1998 list of the top one hundred
novels of the twentieth centuryHemingway has been commodified, or, in author Justin
Kaplan's words, Elvisized. Hemingway's emblematic American masculinity is used to market
everything from tourism to cookbooks to a line of furniture, and his minimalist writing style has
been the subject of a yearly International Imitation Hemingway Competition, with the winners
published in a book series entitled Best of Bad Hemingway.
Although Hemingway's larger-than-life presenceboth in life and after his dramatic suicide in
1961has often threatened to overshadow his work, it is generally agreed that Hemingway is, in
James Nagel's words, one of the finest prose stylists in English, an author whose work gave
rise to the minimalist movement in American fiction, to the work of Raymond Carver and Susan
Minot, as well as many others, including Richard Ford. The presenter of the 1954 Nobel Prize
in literature said: With masterly skill [Hemingway] reproduces all the nuances of the spoken
word, as well as those pauses in which thought stands still and the nervous mechanism is thrown
out of gear. It may sometimes sound like small talk, but it is not trivial when one gets to know
his method. He prefers to leave the work of psychological reflection to his readers and this
freedom is of great benefit to him in spontaneous observation.
That Ernest Hemingway was, for years, the most celebrated writer in America is hardly
surprising. After all, if he had written nothing besides, say, The Sun Also Rises, the early
collection, In Our Time, and the magisterial Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, he would
still be an utterly indispensable American writer. The preposterous and romantic literary myth
that Hemingway himself created and nurtured, meanwhile that of the brawling, hard-drinking,
thrill-seeking sportsman who is also an uncompromising, soulful artist ensured that
generations of writers would not merely revere him, but (often to their own abiding detriment)
would also try to emulate him.
Ernest Hemingways short fiction, often lionized for its valorous portrayal of the steadfast male
exhibiting grace under pressure in the face of an increasingly decadent post-World War I
society, has come in the last few decades under increasing scrutiny. What was once interpreted
as the authors attempt to uphold the ideal of a manly code is nowsince the reinscription of
sexual roles in the 1970smore often either criticized as misogynist and homophobic, or
redressed as a symptomatology of Hemingways latent homosexuality. Concomitant with this
sexual recoding was the posthumous release of The Garden of Eden. This novel, culled from a
sprawling, sixteen hundred page manuscript, engenders an alternate sexuality for Hemingway
something far different from the one he publicly created.
More essential, however , to the rank of icon is Hemingways unquestioned stature as one of the
giants of American literature. His short stories and novels have earned a place in the educational
canon of the American university have received the highest awards, including Pulitzer Prize for
The Old Man and the Sea in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. For his time
Hemingway was the American author whom we saw as a true public figure who hobnobbed with
the rich and famous who commanded wealth that allowed him to be taken seriously as a famous
personality. Hemingways American credentials are impeccable. He was a Midwesterner from
the heartland, just outside Chicago.
From his experiences in World War I and Lost Generation Paris to safaris in Africa and fishing
the Gulf Stream, from covering the Spanish Civil War and World War II to chasing German U-
boats off the Cuban coast, Hemingways life was one full of adventure, Greene reminds us.
Dont bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, Papa once said. If you
want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.
Hemingway endured an equally profound period of development as an expatriate after the war.
While the film does not reveal precisely how his time in Paris affected his writing, it does offer
colorful insider stories about his writerly life. He and his first wife Hadley tried to be artists,
interacting with Gertrude Stein and Picasso. Hemingway taught teaching Pound to box and loved
Ulysses. Stein hated talking about other writers. Hemingway wrote that if you mentioned Joyce
more than once, you wouldnt be invited back to her house: It was like mentioning one general
favorably to another. He admired her advances with rhythm and repetition, but he couldnt get
her to talk much about writing with him. She disliked having to make her work intelligible, he
said, and hated revision.
Some say that Hemingway's personal life should disqualify him from the literature canon. They
state that his torrent affairs, his alcoholism, and his mental state should preclude him from entry
into the canon. These are the very things that help to make Hemingway a unique writer.
Although his genre is fiction, he relies on his real life experiences with the people and places that
he visited. The very definition of the literary canon disputes these critics. "The authors that
represent the literary canon are those that are widely assigned in high school and college
classrooms and have had a great influence on other authors. Literary critics and historians
frequently and fully discuss them. The works by these authors are most likely to be included in
anthologies and studied as World Masterpieces, Major English Authors, or Great American
Writers." (Goodvin) Hemingway's influences on other writers and his worldwide acclaim, along
with his distinctive style have earned him a spot in the American Literature canon. Ernest
Hemingway was once one of the most prominent people on the earth. Numerous countries
respect Hemingway and his writing style. His creative writing details the lives and life's lessons
of people such as bullfighters, anglers, and soldiers. His portrayal of these men of courage who
were seemingly indifferent to joy, grief, pleasure, and pain won him acclaim from critics all over
the world. "His legendary writing style, influenced by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein,"
Many people hold the opinion that there has been no American writer like Ernest
Hemingway. A member of the World War I lost generation, Hemingway was in many ways
his own best character. Whether as his childhood nickname of Champ or as the
older Papa, Ernest Hemingway became a legend of his own lifetime. Although the
drama and romance of his life sometimes seem to overshadow the quality of his work,
Hemingway was first and foremost a literary scholar, a writer and reader of books.
Hemingway enjoyed
bei ng f amous , and del i ght ed i n pl a yi ng f or t he publ i c s pot l i ght . However ,
Hemi ngwayconsidered himself an artist, and he did not want to become celebrated
for all the wrong reasons. From almost the beginning of his writing career, Hemingway
employed a distinctive style which drew comment from many critics. Hemingway does
not give way to lengthy geographical and psychological description. His style has
been said to lack substance because he avoids direct statements and descriptions of
emotion. Basically his style is simple, direct and somewhat plain. He developed a
forceful prose style characterized by simple sentences and few adverbs or
adjectives. He wrote concise, vivid dialogue and exact description of places and things
A mistake that people tend to make in reading, praising, teaching Hemingway is to assume that
he was foremost a stylist. Although he was intensely concerned with his voice on the pageand
although that voice became more distinctive as he agedthe Hemingway of the incantatory
paragraphs and deadpan understatements (The town was very nice and our house was very
fine) is Hemingway at his weakest. It is because weve come to fetishize this voice that we
accept and even admire gnomic truisms like a writer should write what he has to sayan
observation from Hemingways Nobel banquet speech and one of his most quoted linesas if
such raw-nut declarations came with tender insights curled inside. Most dont. Nor was Papa, as
some people (chiefly Papa) have liked to suggest, a pioneer in the craft of elision, of leaving
crucial things unsaid: That tradition runs clear back at least to Henry James, a writer of a very
different ilk