IN the early 1920s Ernest Hemingway was a little-known journalist slumming around Europe and getting into absinthe-fuelled scrapes. Then, a century ago, in 1925, he published “In Our Time”, a book of short stories; in July of that year he started working on “The Sun Also Rises”, his first novel, which fictionalised his antics. It became the most celebrated book about the “Lost Generation” in post-war Europe.
Hemingway became famous in the same way one of his characters described going bankrupt: “gradually and then suddenly”. Eight other novels and novellas followed, as did Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. He remains the most famous American novelist of his century, judged by mentions in Google’s corpus of books. His Wikipedia page also gets more views than those of his contemporaries, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck (see chart). Why?
There are three reasons. First, nobody had written like him before. A short clean sentence is a fine thing. But if the writer has his story straight and his words true he can go long and hard as a bull after a picador and to hell with big words and adverbs and commas. He also knew what to leave out, as he explained: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” This lean style influenced writers of fiction—notably Norman Mailer, Cormac McCarthy and Raymond Carver—as well as journalists. Joan Didion’s spareness reads like sober Hemingway.
Second, his heroes attracted famous admirers. He defined courage as “grace under pressure”: martially, for the soldier Frederic Henry in “A Farewell to Arms”; physically, for the fisherman Santiago in “The Old Man and the Sea”; or sportingly, for the titular cuckolded character in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, who becomes a fearless hunter. In 1955 John F. Kennedy asked for Hemingway’s permission to use this definition in “Profiles in Courage”, which won the Pulitzer prize for biography.
John McCain’s favourite novel was “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940), about the Spanish civil war, which he quoted in a posthumous book: “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” Barack Obama, a fan of the same novel, mentioned it in his eulogy to McCain. Less credibly, Donald Trump has dubbed himself the “Hemingway of 140 characters”.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, Hemingway’s life became legend. He married four times, drank hard, feuded with rivals, was wounded in the first world war, reported on the Omaha Beach landings in the second, ran with the bulls in Spain and survived a plane crash in Africa. But beneath the bravado, his ego was fragile, he sometimes swapped gender roles in bed and suffered from depression. He was one of seven in his family to commit suicide. That has provided ample material for biographies and documentaries, including a six-hour series by Ken Burns in 2021.
But adaptations of his work are scarce. Fitzgerald and Steinbeck enjoy higher ratings and more reviews on Goodreads, a books website. Perhaps Hemingway’s stoic heroes—and hints of sexism and racism, at least in the voices of some characters—are becoming old-fashioned. If so, he may end up like Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde: read keenly by a few, read about by many.
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