His work has influenced the style of writers as different as Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and Raymond Carver.
Hemingway's achievements were great--nearly alone, he established a new standard for precision and clarity in the short story--but they were made all the greater by the fact that Hemingway seemed to catch the very spirit of his age. Born just before the turn of the century, Hemingway identified himself with a new "modern" generation, one that had lost touch with the values of a declining Victorian culture and would struggle to articulate values of its own. Hemingway traveled to Paris, France, where he became part of a group of famous writers and artists that included Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. These writers helped define Modernist literature and epitomized the rejection of the past. For his part, Hemingway wrote of individuals dislocated and disoriented by a social system that no longer made sense; he depicted characters, usually men, who turned in upon themselves to develop the skills to survive in the modern world, thus reinventing American individualism for a new age; and he did it all in a style so compact and exacting that it became a challenge he threw in the face of every other living writer.
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