![]() His prose is so unadorned and unshowy it’s practically ego-less-not a thing one usually hears said about Hemingway, but it’s true. Nobody working in English, or at least in American, had seriously attempted to put the lessons of Flaubert into practice before Hemingway. The discipline of the writing alone is astounding-that’s the kind of thing Hemingway would have said, but it’s absolutely true. So you can see the problem.īut if I were to pick a single American author who has influenced me, it would be silly to skip Hemingway, and if I were to pick a single book it would be ridiculous to skip The Sun Also Rises. ![]() After he was praised he was encrusted with a layer of bad Hemingway imitations, some of which he wrote himself, and then the whole package was thoroughly tarnished by damning allegations against his politics, his attitudes toward women, and his personality, a good many of which are probably quite true. ![]() ![]() Hemingway has already been thoroughly praised, of course, but that’s only part of the difficulty. I’m going to try to do something that is becoming increasingly difficult, which is to praise Ernest Hemingway. ![]() Lev Grossman on Ernest Hemingway, verbal membrane, and The Sun Also Rises The Magician King by Lev Grossman (Viking, 2011)Īuthor of the just-published The Magician King, Lev Grossman joins our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry with this appreciation of what Ernest Hemingway accomplished in his first novel-and never quite did as well again. ![]()
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