Rotten Reviews: Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises, 1926:

His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions, and instead of interpreting his material -- or even challenging it -- he has been content merely to make a carbon copy of a not particularly significant surface life of Paris. ~The Dial

...leaves one with the feeling that the people it describes really do not matter; one is left at the end with nothing to digest. ~New York Times

For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1940:

As a conservative estimate, one million dollars will be spent by American readers for this book. The will get for their money 34 pages of permanent value. These 34 pages tell of a massacre happening in a little Spanish town in the early days of the Civil War... Mr. Hemingway: please publish the massacre scene separately, and then forget For Whom The Bell Tolls; please leave stories of the Spanish Civil War to Malraux...~Commonweal

This book offers not pleasure but mounting pain; as literature it lacks the reserve that steadies genius and that lack not only dims its brilliance but makes it dangerous in its influence. ~Catholic World

Hemingway offered this candid assessment of his own work:

In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style. ~Ernest Hemingway

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 — July 2, 1961) was an American writer and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He was without religious persuasion (an atheist).

Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoical men who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered classics of American literature.

In death, as in life, Ernest Hemingway is controversial. What are your thoughts? Have you read his works because you enjoyed them, or because you were forced to read them? Or are have you escaped/avoided his work completely? Are his works relevant today? Or are they just relics of the past, curiosity pieces from a type of man who no longer exists? Should there be a reassessment of his talent now, almost fifty years after his death? Should new discoveries regarding his personal life* be applied to his work and be part of that reassessment? Or should his works be taken in the context of his era only?

Thanks for visiting today. Your thoughts and comments are always appreciated.

*This is a link to an article in the New York Times archives and you may have to register or log in to read it. I apologize for this inconvenience but the article by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt is very well written, and there is no charge to register or access the page.