In the following essay from an anthology celebrating Hemingway's centennial, Knott reviews responses to the author's controversial novel To Have and Have Not.

In the following essay, Lamb analyzes the dialogue in “Indian Camp,” “A Canary for One," and “Hills Like White Elephants.”

In the following essay, Moddelmog examines In Our Time, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, and The Garden of Eden through the lens of queer theory to argue that although Hemingway did not depict many stereotypical nuclear families, his fiction is nevertheless deeply concerned with kinship.

In the following essay, Stoneback meditates upon Hemingway's use of geography and myth in his short fiction.

In the following essay, Lindsay suggests that Hemingway fuses the traditions of the pastoral and tragedy in his writing.

In the following essay, Helstern investigates the ways in which white masculinity gets constructed in the Nick Adams stories.

In the following excerpt, Berman considers Hemingway's interest in and relationship to religion and philosophy, with particular attention to his novel A Farewell to Arms.

In the following article, Paul interviews several well-known and highly respected writers concerning Hemingway's influence on their own work and what they find most compelling about Hemingway.

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

In the following essay, Summerhayes examines Hemingway's use of language in “Big Two-Hearted River.”

In the following essay, Nolan provides a close reading of a much neglected story “The Sea Change,” in order to demonstrate Hemingway's artistry.

In the following essay, Strong elucidates the way in which Hemingway “negotiates the matter of race” in “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife.”

In the following essay, Comley discusses how Hemingway's works, particularly their depiction of gender, contributed to her development as a teacher and scholar.

In the following essay, Ferrero explores the usefulness of gender criticism in Hemingway's short fiction.

In the following essay, Tilton examines the behavior of Mrs. Garner in the story “Ten Indians.”

In the following essay, Lamb contends that Hemingway uses a semiotic approach to critique anti-Semitism in “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.”

In the essay below, Gajdusek explores how some of the characters in Hemingway's fiction represent a “self-projection” of the author's own history and background, asserting that Hemingway “lets himself … stand in for the failures and delinquencies of twentieth-century man,” and “descends into his own unconscious to gain what insight he has into and what evidence he has for the basic moral failure of his age.”

In the following essay, originally given as the keynote address for the Ninth International Hemingway Conference in 2000, Walcott, a Nobel Prize-winning poet, recounts how, as a young writer growing up on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Hemingway's precise descriptions of geography and light were critical to his own development as a poet.

One could easily list the particular moments that Hemingway chooses to focus on in his short stories and nearly always they will be found to be moments of crisis, tension and passion. This is not to say that they are epiphanies in Joyce's sense, but rather that they deal with moments of pain, shock, strain, test, moments of emotional heightening of some kind. It may be an ageing courageous bull fighter facing and succumbing to his last bull, it may be a man listening to his wife say that she is leavi...

In the summer of 1924, Ernest Hemingway wrote to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas to report on the progress he was making with a long short story in which he was "trying to do the country like [Paul] Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell, I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out the way it ought to, it is swell about the fish, but isn't writing a hard job thou...

A proper consideration of the Nick Adams stories has been seriously bedevilled by the current critical orthodoxy surrounding the notion of 'initiation'. The desire to 'initiate' or 'educate' Nick is more apparent in the critics than in his creator who, for the most part, is content to let Nick fool around, in and around Michigan, before lighting out for the territory ahead—Europe. The reason for this pedagogical obsession is to be sought in the desire of the ...

In 1972, Ezra Pound made one of his rare comments, that "Hem did not disappoint." Craftsman that Pound had consistently been, his admiration for Hemingway grew at least partly from the younger writer's accomplishments in his writing. Forty-two years earlier, in 1930, Pound had himself classified Hemingway's writing style as "Imagist," describing the younger man as accepting the principles of good writing that had been contained in the earliest imagist d...

It is now accepted by almost every critic of Hemingway that the hero in his work deserves special attention. Philip Young sees the Hemingway protagonist as a sick man, wounded physically and psychically [see CLC, Vol 13]. Carlos Baker reads in him symbolic meanings, expressive of the contemporary emotional tensions [see excerpt above], Leo Gurko has written a full-length book on the subject, for to him Hemingway's novels are essentially portrayals of the hero as the "individual man" [se...

In the essay below, Freedman speculates to what extent the media's fascination with and exploitation of the cult of personality in the case of Hemingway affects considerations of his writing and whether or not this may be justified.

Ernest Hemingway's early years as a writer constituted an apprenticeship, during which he emulated a number of his elder contemporaries. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and James Joyce are among those who, it often has been asserted, contributed certain qualities to Hemingway's technique. His relationship to T. S. Eliot, however, is of a different order. At one time or another, Hemingway was a friend and an admirer of Stein, Pound, Anderson, and Joyce, but his attitude toward El...

[Hemingway's] first forty-five stories may be conveniently taken as a kind of unit, since they were all written within ten years, and since they represent what Hemingway thought worthy of including in his first three collections: In Our Time (1925), Men Without Women (1927), and Winner Take Nothing (1933). Taken together or separately, they are among the great short stories of modern literature. Their range of symbolic effects is even greater than the variety of subjects and themes employed. The subj...

This short, almost desperate, and beautiful story ["A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"] is an unusually fine example of a very special kind of story which is not anecdotal at all. If you were asked by somebody, "What happens in this story?" you would have to reply, "Nothing." Now nothing is exactly what the story is about: Nothing, and the steps we take against Nothing. The fact that there is no plot is part of the story's meaning: in a world characterized by �...

When Hemingway's stories first appeared, they seemed to be a transcription of the real world, new because they were accurate and because the world in those days was also new. With his insistence on "presenting things truly," he seemed to be a writer in the naturalistic tradition (for all his technical innovations)…. Going back to his work [later], you perceive his kinship with a wholly different group of novelists, let us say with Poe and Hawthorne and Melville: the haunted and n...

When F. Scott Fitzgerald commented to Hemingway that Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms is less successful than some of the women from his early short stories, he showed again his acute literary judgment. As Fitzgerald phrases it, "in the stories you were really listening to women—here you're only listening to yourself." Whatever the reason for the distancing that was to mar Hemingway's portrayal of women characters from 1929 on (except for Pilar, Maria, and Marie Mor...

The best of [Hemingway's] critics recognized that though he dealt with a limited range of characters, placed them in quite similar circumstances, measured them against an unvarying code, and rendered them in a style that epitomized these other limitations, it was precisely this ruthless economy that gave his writing its power. And when Hemingway himself commented on his aims, it was clear that he knew what he was doing. He knowingly restricted himself in order to strip down, compress, and energize hi...

[Hemingway's collected poems, 88 Poems,] show the thin, hard stream of his contempt even more clearly than his prose. Among the people and things that he subjected to his nostrilwincing amonia were blank verse, "clean" sports, Martel cognac, highbrows, gabby Jews, clergymen, wedding gifts, gung-ho soldiers, Teddy Roosevelt, Democracy, expatriates, liberals…. And yet—it sounds unbelievable after this catalogue of peeve—Hemingway was an endearing writer as well as a c...

It is something of a joke, in view of the common belief that Hemingway is a tough, laconic writer, that the reason for the difficulty [in interpreting "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"] is that this story by an acknowledged "realist" is as near, in its quality and its effect, to a poem as prose can be without ceasing to be honest prose. (p. 112) Age, death, despair, love, the boredom of life, two elderly men seeking sleep and forgetfulness, and one still young enough to feel passion,...

Hemingway has not created a Style: he has rather created the artful illusion of a Style, for he is a clever artist and there is a great deal of cleverness in all that he has done. He has conjured up an effect of Style by a process of evasion, very much as he sets up an aura of emotion—by walking directly away from emotion! What I am trying to suggest is that the famous Hemingway Style is not "organic." And any style worthy of the name must be, as the much-worn, but nevertheless truthful...