Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert Penn Warren

Critical Essay by Robert Penn Warren

SOURCE: “Hemingway,” in The Kenyon Review, Vol. IX, No. 1, Winter, 1947, pp. 1-28.

In the following essay, Warren answers critics of Hemingway and explores themes of the quasi-religious significance of human love and the solitariness of the individual in A Farewell to Arms.

The situations and characters of Hemingway's world are usually violent. There is the hard-drinking and sexually promiscuous world of The Sun Also Rises; the chaotic and brutal world of war as in A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, many of the inserted sketches of In Our Time, the play The Fifth Column, and some of the stories; the world of sport, as in “Fifty Grand,” “My Old Man,” “The Undefeated,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”; the world of crime as in “The Killers,” “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,” and To Have and To Have Not. Even when the situation of a story...
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