Ernest Hemingway: A Sensitive and Vulnerable Mind Full of Contradictions...

Today, I bring you Ernest Hemingway. What a fascinating man! But so tragic. :( 

What was your first experience with Hemingway? What is your opinion of his work? Critics still can’t agree!

Hemingway is easily known as one of the greatest American authors. We have come to know him as the writer who disdained “the grandiose wordiness of Victorian prose for a clean, stripped-back simplicity, conveying emotion by what was not said as much as by what was.” In fact, I don’t think there is any living person who doesn’t know Hemingway and his “Iceburg Theory.” One article even compared his legacy to the literary equivalent to a Nike swoosh or the golden arches, asking, “Who doesn’t have a mental picture of the gray beard and safari shirt? Who couldn’t vamp a Hemingway-like sentence in a pinch?” And what a shame that perhaps because “we’ve come to fetishize this voice that we accept and even admire gnomic truisms like ‘a writer should write what he has to say’—an observation from Hemingway’s Nobel banquet speech,” we may miss what he was really good at: his “earlier, more uncertain writing—the prose that openly struggles to track and parse a mess of a life—that gets into your blood.”

In short, Hemingway tried to prove that less is more (coming from his journalistic background) and taking his cue from Ezra Pound who taught him to “distrust adjectives,” that adjectives can do more harm than good in writing prose. Some critics, however, say Hemingway’s penchant for creating novels that usually follow a basic chronological order, are boring and typical for one touted as such a great American author. And when critics aren’t arguing about his genius, they argue about why he is a genius! Some argue that it is that which Hemingway leaves out, which, by proxy means, we, the reader, must put back in, that makes him a genius, while others say it’s NOT what he left out but what he left in, and that everyone has gotten it all wrong! Confused yet?