Ernest Hemingway, A Legacy For American LiteratureEssay Preview: Ernest Hemingway, A Legacy For American LiteratureReport this essayErnest Hemingway, A legacy for American LiteratureSome say that Hemingways 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) Hemingways 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 lifes 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,” (American Authors) is direct, to the point, and spoken in an even tone. This style is suited to his main subject matter. His straightforward no frills writing style became so well known that many others frequently copied it. Some literary critics consider Hemingway, as “the father of The Lost Generation, a subcategory, of the American Modernist Period in literature.” (Goodvin) Hemingways literary legacy is his off hand, direct story telling prose, which has been a helpful model for numerous novelist of the twentieth century.
“The impact of Hemingways style on American Literature is massive. It still has influence today.” (American Authors) His style influenced so many authors that his style is in a great deal of fiction today written by other authors who copied it. Some of the authors of today are influenced either directly by Hemingway or indirectly through other writers who emulated his style. James Nagel, Professor of American Literature at the University of Georgia, said it best, “No other writer has equaled Hemingway in portraying a cultural image that links the time-honored masculine virtues of power, honesty, and fortitude.” His writings reveal an unwavering commitment to literature and to the integrity of his craft. He captures the essence of the human experience in a writing style that is uncomplicated, direct, modest, and pleasingly stylish.
Hemingway learned to write in controlled and understated prose as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. This style has served him well and he used it in the best of his works. Hemingways simple style, absent of elaborate extremes and metaphoric add-ons has influenced many of todays reporters in almost all multi media such as newspapers, magazines and even television news. The refinement of Hemingways writing style draws from the precision with which he illustrates the character, personality, and temperament of individual experience.
In his own time, Hemingway affected writers within his modernist literary circle. According to Kenneth Lynn, “James Joyce called A Clean, Well Lighted Place, one of the best stories ever written.” Hemingways style portrayed the truth of the situation. He influenced writers such as “Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans (1958)” (American Authors), and other Beat Generation writers. J.D. Salinger, writer of The Catcher in the Rye (1951), “is said to have wanted to be a great American short story writer in the same stratum as Hemingway.” (Qtd Lynn 416) “Hemingways abrupt prose style is known to have inspired Bret Easton Ellis, Less than Zero (1985), Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996), Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) and many other Generation X writers.” (Burgess) Even when Hemingway was in his early stages of writing, when he was just developing into the writer he would become, noted novelist such as Stein, Ford, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce proclaimed him the next great American novelist. (Burgess)
Hemingways influence goes beyond the more recognized fiction authors. His tightly written prose is in quite a bit of Western and Crime genre novels by Elmore Leonard. (American Authors) Leonard once said, “I learned by imitating Hemingway Although, I didnt take myself or anything as seriously as he did.” (Qtd. Burgess) Hemingways impact on Latin American Literature can be seen in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who imitated Hemingways view of mans struggle with the sea in many of his novels. Marquez not only emulates Hemingways view, he also duplicates his writing style. (Burgess)
Hemingways first three books, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), In Our Time (short stories, 1924), and The Torrents of Spring (a novel, 1926), had fascinated critics chiefly because of his literary style. Hemingways first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), won him worldwide fame. A plot less story concerning disheartened refugees in Paris who break away from their boredom with alcohol consumption, fighting, and sex; this novel turned out to be the standard by which all other writers of the lost generation would be compared. Hemingway only improved his writing style with his next book, A Farewell to Arms (1929), based on his wartime experience in Italy. His coverage of the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent spawned another fine novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingways novella, The Old Man
, is one of the most influential works of his generation.
A few years later, In The Time After the Fall and The Winds of Summer are considered by critics to have the first true story of the nineteenth century, from the life of Frederick Pareto, or the “Old God”, to the events that have unfolded over two centuries. For the last 100 years, this novel has been honored with three Oscars, seven Pulitzer Prizes, and five Hugo Prizes. It is an important work of literary genius, a story about how the French were treated. It is also an unusual choice for a book about slavery in a country so well known for what it was, and an important novel in the development of a political society in a period of deep religious confusion. This book is written with the interest of history.
The first book A Farewell to Arms, written by Hemingway in 1932, is the story of George Hemenway, the young, very young man who had made a name as the country’s first slave-owner.
In the fall of 1929, the Spanish newspaper, Del Humberto, published A Farewell to Arms, in which we learn of an ill-fated trial of French settlers on a Spanish island. We encounter, of course, such tragic tales as that which John Donne told in The Lion and the Bull about the life of a sailor and how, just after reaching the age of ninety, he returned to Italy and began his labor-intensive work on ship. In these stories, where Hemingway’s characters first try to escape their confinement outside in the storm room, they are at once captivated by their experiences, and are given a story of such deep personal and political importance that they almost seem to make such a crucial part of the story. The American novelist and actor John F. Kennedy wrote a popular and moving novel, The Lion and the River, in which Hemingway, his character, is as much a part of his own background as the young man he married.
The greatest work on slavery in the twentieth century came and went under the direction of the English poet James Paine. It is a novel about a young man whose personal life is in disarray and disillusionment, and whose life in a post-traumatic situation has become one which he often calls “lost”. It is an engrossing story about the life of a man who becomes engaged in a struggle with his own personal mortality. A new book by Robert Conquest, The Slave Trade, has its own distinctive subtitle, The Last Years of Frederick Pareto, the “Old God”.
The book, published in two volumes, A Farewell To Arms is a brilliant, well written, and deeply told work: a portrait of the twentieth century which traces the course of human history in a way its authors, Hemingway, and French readers, might not have been able to anticipate. The author offers a beautiful and vivid portrait of a man who, after three years of imprisonment in the brig with some of his wife and children, finds his life in freedom only