SOURCE: Stewart, Matthew C. “Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting Recent Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War.” Papers on Language and Literature 36, no. 2 (spring 2000): 115-217.

In the following essay, Stewart attempts to refute revisionist arguments about the influence of World War I on Hemingway's fiction.

“Napoleon taught Stendahl how to write.”

—Ernest Hemingway

To ask whether or not the First World War had a profound effect upon Ernest Hemingway would, not so long ago, have been considered a rhetorical question. It can no longer be considered so, since the influential critics Kenneth S. Lynn and Frederick Crews have sought to dismiss the importance of World War I from Hemingway's life and fiction.¹ The mainstream interpretation, which held sway well into the 1980s, had been advanced in most detail by Philip Young, whose breadth of analysis and psychoanalytical bent amplified the theory of the wound first advanced by Edmund...