Hemingway acknowledged that Stein taught him to write simply, clearly, and sparely. He also felt the influence went the other way. He wrote of her, to a friend, "You know a funny thing, she never could write dialogue. It was terrible. She learned to do it from my stuff."
Bellow's Eugene Henderson has the initials E.H., the novel about him is set in Africa, and he is the same type of hard-drinking, brawling, bullying personality as Hemingway.
"There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit."
"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment."
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
"The only thing for me to do is write good books. I may be a no good son of a bitch and lead a highly criticizable life. But I am a good and conscientious writer, and they ought to give you that....I love my work more than I love any woman or anything else."
Hemingway played football in high school and was a lifelong sportsman, obsessed from his youth with hunting and fishing, but had no formal education after Oak Park High. He drove an ambulance in France in World War I and also served (and was wounded) in the Italian army. After the war, he was a reporter for the "Toronto Star". In the 1920s, he settled in Paris as part of the group of American expatriates who formed Gertrude Stein's circle. She was an enormous influence on his writing, teaching t more...
Hemingway played football in high school and was a lifelong sportsman, obsessed from his youth with hunting and fishing, but had no formal education after Oak Park High. He drove an ambulance in France in World War I and also served (and was wounded) in the Italian army. After the war, he was a reporter for the "Toronto Star". In the 1920s, he settled in Paris as part of the group of American expatriates who formed Gertrude Stein's circle. She was an enormous influence on his writing, teaching the virtue of the simple declarative sentence. He was also influenced by Ezra Pound, whom he revered, and became friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald (a stormy friendship, which did not endure). His first American publication was the group of stories, "In Our Time" (1925), in which the concerns and values of the so-called "lost generation" were articulated for the first time: their postwar disillusionment; their cynical, stoic endurance in the face of pain; their brutal honesty; and their distance from emotional involvement. Hemingway moved back to the U.S. in the later '20s, and began to write novels; his first great success was "The Sun Also Rises" in 1926. He moved to Key West in 1928; from that base, he often visited Spain, where he became an aficionado of bullfighting, and went on safari in Africa. He covered the Spanish Civil War as a reporter, then moved to Cuba in the 1940s, where he kept an estate until a group of revolutionaries killed his beloved dog. Hemingway had four wives and fathered three sons. He became one of the century's most influential writers. (Nabokov once commented that Hemingway wrote about "bells, bulls, and balls.") His fame culminated in a 1952 Pulitzer Prize for "The Old Man and the Sea", and the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954. All his life, he had phobias about taxes, telephones, and speaking in public: He accepted the Nobel Prize in absentia. ("A writer should write what he has to say, not speak it.") A heavy drinker, Hemingway was ill, both physically and mentally, for several years at the end of his life; his debilitated physical state was worsened after a plane crash en route to his fifth African safari, in which he was seriously injured, including a ruptured liver and kidney, broken bones, a concussion, first-degree burns, and vision and hearing loss. Delusional and unable to write, he endured a variety of treatments, including shock therapy at the Mayo Clinic. Finally, depressed and frustrated, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a double-barreled shotgun weeks before his 62nd birthday.less...
For as long as I can remember, I've had a snobby skinny-guy aversion to Hemingway -- what I perceived to be the man, his mythology and his seeming embodiment of bourgeois literary masculinity (skiing, bull fighting & boxing). But after reading this book, I've come to realize that my perception grew out of a vulgar popular opinion rather than any competent or sensitive reading of his work.
This is an excellent book. It is witty and very humorous at times; the language is well-tuned; his opinions on writing are interesting; and he reveals himself to be more than capable of self-reflection. The stories about eminent modernist writers are a real delight -- so are the descriptions of food.
I encourage other snobby skinny white guys to read this book!
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For as long as I can remember, I've had a snobby skinny-guy aversion to Hemingway -- what I perceived to be the man, his mythology and his seeming embodiment of bourgeois literary masculinity (skiing, bull fighting & boxing). But after reading this book, I've come to realize that my perception grew out of a vulgar popular opinion rather than any competent or sensitive reading of his work.
This is an excellent book. It is witty and very humorous at times; the language is well-tuned; his opinions on writing are interesting; and he reveals himself to be more than capable of self-reflection. The stories about eminent modernist writers are a real delight -- so are the descriptions of food.
I encourage other snobby skinny white guys to read this book!
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