Ernest Hemingway: American Author Challenge

"Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in July 21, 1899, in Oak Park IL. He was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. He killed himself in July 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho."

**This is part of our American Author Challenge 2017. This author will be read in December. The general discussion thread can be found right here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/244600

Well, folks, Hemingway is our last author of 2017. Hemingway doesn't seem to get a lot of LT love. I wonder why that is? Maybe, his work hasn't aged as well, as say Mr. Steinbeck, who is definitely an LT favorite. I was introduced to him, in grade school, with The Old Man in the Sea but did not really get back to him, until the early 80s, when I read A Farewell to Arms, which I really loved. The last one, I enjoyed, a few years ago, was A Moveable Feast. The only thing, I really haven't been able to connect with are his short stories. Many I do like, especially some of the Nick Adams stories, but overall I felt a bit let down.

This time around, I think I will focus on rereads of both A Farewell and The Sun Also Rises.

I am curious what everyone else will try? Thoughts?

>3 msf59: I guess I'm in the minority on LT as I love Hemingway and dislike Steinbeck.

Not sure what I'll read yet. Maybe The Green Hills of Africa or re-read The Sun Also Rises.

The only Hemingway I own is The Old Man and the Sea. I always say I don't like him, but I honestly can't remember what I've read - I think maybe just a shory story or two in school. I think it's the idea of him I don't like - the sort of mythology built up around him... Anyway, I may read TOMatS, but I'll also check the library's shelves this weekend and see what might appeal.

>3 msf59:

Despite being a former Oak Park kid, like Ernest,
and his father was my Grandma's doctor,
I'm in the ee cummings camp:

what did little ernest croon
in his death at afternoon

cow thou art
to bull returnest
was de words
of little ernest

(from memory, so a few words might be off)

I LOVE his short terse sentences and LOATHE his attitude towards women
and his glorification of bullfighting.

I have a plan. I read and loved "The Paris Wife" earlier this year. I'm going to re-read a bit of it to get my head back into the times and then I am going to go for In Our Time: Stories By, Hemingway's first major published work in 1925 that coincided with greater attention to him and the start of the downfall of his marriage to Hadley Richardson. Once done I plan to continue with his next work, from 1926, The Sun Also Rises. Then as time allows I might be able to fit in a re-read of The Old Man and the Sea or something else.

I've been looking forward to this month's AAC.

I am also in the minority as I like Hemingway quite a bit.

To Have and Have not will be mine this month.

I have The Sun Also Rises on the shelf (well actually it is on the bedside table stack now). It's a good thing it's slim, that stack is edging higher than the bedside lamp.

I have read most of Hemingway's best known stuff, mostly under instruction and waaaaay back when. He is not my favorite, but when I revisit him now, I often find more to like than I expect to. I have no patience with The Old Man (cut the damned line already!) A Moveable Feast is lovely, and that's not a word I would tend to apply very often to "little ernest" (that always makes me chuckle---he spent so much time and effort trying to make himself BIG. That's what he was doing with his attitude toward women, always either infantilizing or objectivizing them). I have two posthumously published offerings unread on my shelves---The Garden of Eden and True at First Light. Neither was finished when Hemingway died, so they aren't exactly representative of his work, but I bought them intending to read them, so I will probably get to one of them this month. I find it very interesting that the Library of America has so far not published a volume of Hemingway. This may well be due to legal restraints, of course, but so far he isn't included in that "canon".

>11 laytonwoman3rd: My appreciation for Hemingway began building relatively late in life, maybe 20 years ago. When I was little I loved Spencer Tracy in The Old Man and the Sea. To be punny, that sorta set the hook for me liking the book when I read it in my teens. There were a number of his short stories that really touched me as well. But the muy macho stuff really put me off. I did like A Farewell To Arms when I read it in my 20's and enjoyed it quite well on a subsequent revisit. The Sun Also Rises I did not care for much and I want to see what it will be like reading it again now.

I have not read the 2 you mention here, Garden and First Light, nor Islands in the Stream.

Green Hills of Africa bothered me and I'm not sure I read all that much of it. I should revisit that one someday.

A bio or two on Hemingway which I read long after helped me understand things better, as did A Moveable Feast and The Paris Wife most recently.

And now I'm thinking maybe I can squeeze in the Hadley Richardson biography this month.

When Islands in the Stream was published, my husband was excited about a "new" Hemingway novel, and we purchased it in hard cover--no small thing for us at the time. I remember thinking it wasn't bad, but I barely remember any of it now, other than a couple images from the movie made with George C. Scott and Claire Bloom. I think their performances were mighty fine.

>11 laytonwoman3rd: I love A Moveable Feast so maybe it is an excuse for a reread Linda.

>15 jnwelch:, >11 laytonwoman3rd: I love A Moveable Feast, too, Caroline and Linda. Did you see the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris? It reminded me of it.

I've read most things Hemingway, even the Nick Adams short stories (which actually are really good), so I'm just going to follow along with the discussion.

>15 jnwelch: Midnight in Paris moved up the pile when I found a box of dvds I’d bought and not yet watched Joe. So soon...

My favorite Hemingway is A Movable Feast. I tried to get through The Collected Short Stories about 5-6 years ago, but I didn't manage it. A little went a loooooooong way in that book. I am filling a shameful gap and reading The Old Man and the Sea.

I've owned a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls for over 25 years, and I'm finally going to read it this month, once I finish the book for my RL book discussion group.

The book has sentimental value -- long story, but it involves a trip to a used bookstore in Princeton, during some choir tour free time, with the man who I eventually married. You'd think I would have gotten around to reading it by now . . .

I purchased a copy of The Sun Also Rises yesterday; that will be my Hemingway read for the month. I'm struck by the mixed feelings the group, as a whole, has for him. Some love him, some hate him, even a fan can have clear favorites among his works.... We should have some good discussions to wrap up our 2017 AAC.

According to the about the author section in the edition I read, The Sun Also Rises made Hemingway “not only the voice of “the Lost Generation” but the preeminent writer of his time.” It came out in 1926 and is definitely a product of its times. It was interesting from an historical point of view and I might have liked it better if I was into drinking, fishing and bull fighting.

I have good and bad news to report:

Good : I read a Hemingway for the challenge.
Bad : It was execrable.



To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

In this case hard boiled is also half baked.

Found the constant references to Chinks and Niggers to be extremely annoying and distasteful but it was only 180 pages long.

>21 PaulCranswick: "In this case hard boiled is also half baked." And that, in a nutshell, is why I rarely warm up to his stuff.

as a youngster in San Francisco in the 60's I heard chinks and nigger used all the time by some working class men, although I'd say it was more often chinks and spades and spics and dagos. And it was certainly never said in our house. But if Hemingway is writing in the 1930's about hard boiled men talking that way I'd say it was pretty authentic.

I'm not going to try defending that sort of talk in any way whatsoever, of course.

>23 RBeffa:

Wasn't Hemingway one of those hard boiled racists who talked like that?

>24 m.belljackson: I don't know. I know it has been said of him, but I get the sense that it was extremely common to think that way several generations ago. I think it needed to age out so to speak. Hem is at least documenting the way it was. I know there have been a number of writers I have read over the years that rather shock me with casual racism evident in their writing. It is something to learn from. I've read a fair amount of Hemingway, but not the book Paul cites. The N word was just about the worst thing you could say when I was a kid so I was frequently shocked at the language of some of the working classes. Then I was reverse shocked when my son was in school, and this was maybe 20 years ago, the black kids, some of them, were calling each other nigger.

Somewhere Richard said something along the lines that where Hemingway really shines is in his short stories. I agree.

>26 jnwelch: I dunno. Hemingway has some great short stories, but also some not so great ones. Before I read A Moveable Feast I thought either A Farewell to Arms or more likely For Whom The Bells Toll was his magnum opus. Mostly because it has been a long time since Bells, I don't know now. Much of A Moveable Feast however is vignettes that can be read as short stories.

>25 RBeffa:

There's a world of difference when a Black person addresses another with the n-word
or when a gay person calls him or herself queer than when white or heterosexual people do,
ranging from humor, acceptance and love through irony, hatred, and self loathing...and beyond.

I did read it last month, but will share my thoughts, as it is Hemmingway ;-)


Voor wie de klok luidt (= For whom the bell tolls in Dutch translation) by Ernest Hemingway, 573 pages

Robert Jordan is a Spanish speaking American who joined the International Brigades in support of the Republic. He is send out to guerillas in the mountains near Segovia, to blow up a bridge after a larger attack has started. We follow Robert Jordan in three days, starting at his arrival at the hiding place of the guerillas. He falls in love with a young girl, who escaped the fascists.
Great descriptions of the intense feelings that come up when everyone is preparing for their important job and the conflicts that arise from this state of mind.

>28 m.belljackson: Yes, I didn't think I needed to state the obvious. I found it jarring at the time.

I was going to delay reading A Farewell to Arms until after I finished The Known World, but then Big Ernie showed up, waving that big, well...um...BIG double barreled shotgun around and being belligerent. (I think I smelled liquor on his breath.) He didn't have a shirt on, and appeared to be wearing pajama bottoms.



So I thought immediately reading the book written by that nice Mr. Hemingway fellow would brighten his mood at least a little. So that's what I'm doing.

I've already read three of Hem's books this year: For Whom the Bells, A Moveable Feast, and The Old Man and the Sea. I also read Spain in Our Hearts, which recounted Hemingway's research and reporting during the Spanish Civil War; I read the narrative history, then Hemingway's novel. In the same sequence, I read The Paris Wife, a fictionalized version of Hemingway's marriage to Hadley Richardson, followed by A Moveable Feast, which is Hemingway's reminiscences of roughly the same period.

Hi. I'm new to this challenge. My name is Megan. :)
I'm in!
A Farewell to Arms, here I come.

Woot! Megan is in!! Finally... *grin*

I finished The Old Man and the Sea and I loved it. What a lovely little book. It has all the things I love about a Hemingway story (the ones I like). It's a pure and simple, straightforward tale of courage and perseverance. The relationships between the old man and the boy, the man and the sea, the man and the fish are real and intense. The inner dialogue of the old man as he fights the fish is beautifully written. Wonderful story.

>33 nittnut: Yes! That's one of his (The Old Man and the Sea) that I really like, too.

I reread The Old Man and the Sea today for the first time since seventh grade and discovered I don't like it any more now than I did then. It's pretty much everything I dislike about Hemingway in one (mercifully short) volume.

>35 amanda4242:

Instead of shooting the albatross with his crossbow, he caught and killed it.

>36 m.belljackson: Except there's something triumphant about Santiago's struggle with the marlin, even though he can't bring it back whole. The albatross just brought death and despair.

>37 amanda4242:

Yet both bird and fish were innocent...

>38 m.belljackson: So was the steer which went into the meatloaf I just made...

The Old Man and the Sea is the only Hemingway I have read, and I loved it! I was struck by the spare prose and the bleak scenes....ah.
My current one is A Farewell to Arms, and it reads like a stream of consciousness almost. I like it so far, in the 7 pages I have got through.

>40 LovingLit: I loved A Farewell to Arms. It's one of the very few books that made me cry.

I'm starting For Whom the Bell Tolls. We'll see how I like it . . .

Now 90 pages or so into A Farewell to Arms. I have no negatives to report, and can say I am strongly pulled into the story, although not overly wowed by it yet. I get the feeling this is a 'big picture' work...in which case I will reserve judgement for the end.

My comments about The Sun Also Rises which I finished this afternoon.

I went back and forth on my rating of this novel several times. It's so easy to see how Hemingway was said to alter the novel, to take the form into new territory. At first, I was underwhelmed: short, choppy sentences and unconvincing dialogue. But as Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley and their companions in Paris and Pamplona developed, as the tensions of fear, loathing, and longing entwined them in adolescent but also sympathetic tenor, I fell under their spell and enjoyed the narrative ride. That Jake and Brett are in love, and that fate has contrived to keep them apart (that is all I'm saying about that so as to avoid spoilers), serve as the primary thematic vehicle for exploring a time and place and a generation devastated by WWI.

Racist language and anti-Semitic themes are part of why I struggled with my rating; can I excuse those by pointing to the 1926 publication date? In today's world, I find it harder to make that call. And it hardly feels adequate to "knock off a star" for such. So, I rated the novel for its literary merits as I perceive them without reference to the undertone of bias and discrimination. It's a great novel. And its author and characters are profoundly flawed. That is both the figure and the ground.

By the way, this makes me an AAC purist for the first time ever! Hooray!

I'm about 60 pages into For Whom the Bell Tolls. Impressions so far: much macho posturing, but also one very strong female character. Very interesting . . .

I've finally started on In Our Time and finding it to be very powerful. I can't recall exactly when I first read this - maybe 20-25 years ago. It is something of an experiment in writing with vignettes of WWI interspersed between Nick Adams stories set in Michigan. There's a message here with this- I need to pay attention. I can already see elements of Hemingway's life, past and future, splashed across this.

>45 EBT1002: Congratulations!

I've just pulled True at First Light off my shelf, and read the introduction. This is a "fictional memoir", the manuscript for which Hemingway left unfinished at this death. In fact, it seems, he hadn't worked on it in a decade or so. His son, Patrick, who lived much of the real life it is based on, edited the manuscript, and it was published in 1999 (I think). Patrick's introduction make me admire HIM, and want to read the work, which I must view as a collaboration, rather than pure Papa.

>45 EBT1002: congrats on your AAC efforts this year! It's a good feeling :)

I am 2/3 of the way though A Farewell to Arms, and am liking it a lot. I will report back later, but for now, I am off until the 28th Dec!! Happy Holidays one and all!!!

Happy Yule Book Flood!

Finished up In Our Time. This is a powerful work - an unconventional grouping of stories that marked Hemingway's first major success as a writer. I believe these are the stories he is writing in A Moveable Feast and this time in his life when he is writing these is well covered in Paula McLain's The Paris Wife. In some ways the success that started here doomed his marriage to Hadley Richardson. One can also see many elements of Hemingway's life so far within these stories and the creation of the post WWI 'Lost Generation' . This is at least a 4 star read and I am very glad to have read it for the AAC. Stuff like this is why Hemingway is one of my favorite writers.

This was a reread for me - first read sometime in the early to mid 90's. I will likely read it again one day.

I read The Old Man and the Sea. It was fine - not nearly as boring as I feared, but I'm still not a fan.

Status achieved: Purist.

Well, I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. I liked it pretty well, but probably will not be eager to pick up any other Hemingway, especially with the comments about racism in his work. This one had some anti-Gypsy messaging, which I didn't like, and some stereotypical descriptions of the Spanish character; but not so objectionable as his other work, it sounds like.