This title includes in-depth critical discussions of his life and works. The shadow Ernest Hemingway casts over American literature is nothing less than colossal. Widely imitated, his distinctive prose style revolutionized American writing and deeply influenced an entire generation of minimalist authors like Raymond Carver and Susan Minot. His novels and short stories captured the essence of what Gertrude Stein called ‘the lost generation’, the men and women who lived through World War I and were profoundly shaken by its violence and chaos, and launched Hemingway’s reputation as an icon of stoical, American masculinity. Edited by Eugene Goodheart, Edytha Macy Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brandeis University, this volume brings together a wide variety of criticism on major works like
The Sun Also Rises ,
A Farewell to Arms ,
For Whom the Bell Tolls ,
The Old Man and the Sea , and Hemingway’s most widely read and anthologized short stories. Original essays by Jennifer Banach Palladino, Robert C. Evans, Matthew Bolton, and Neil Heims lend context to Hemingway’s life and accomplishments with their examinations of World War I and the Spanish Civil War, the critical reception of Hemingway’s oeuvre, Hemingway’s prose style, and the psychology and anti-Semitic strains of
The Sun Also Rises . Previously published essays by renowned Hemingway scholars such as Carlos Baker, Scott Donaldson, and Mark Spilka deepen the discussion with close readings of
Hills Like White Elephant ,
A Farewell to Arms , and
The Sun Also Rises , while reprints of more recent critical offerings discuss Hemingway’s portrayals of gender, his relationships with naturalism and modernism, and his moral and artistic visions. Finally, Petrina Crockford weighs in for
The Paris Review
on Hemingway’s larger-than-life persona and his place in American letters. Each essay is 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of ‘Works Cited’, along with endnotes.
