When I was in Gr.8 we studied The Old Man and the Sea. We studied it to death, I was innoculated against ever loving anything written by Hemingway. That lasted about 30 years.

So we went to Paris a couple of years ago and I was looking for something to read there, something that was related to the city and I picked up The Paris Wife which is the story of his first wife based on their letters to one another and her relationship with him. He married at 21 I think and she was 29 and very sheltered. I read The Moveable Feast to get his perspective of that time period, and enjoyed that too, Mary.

As for his reputation, he was somewhat of a Shakespearan character, larger than life. He purposely did that too, taking a lot of risks and was often in the public eye. During those times he was thought of as a Byron.

I think his experience in WW1 shaped his war novels. It profoundly affected him. I've included a link about the man which discusses his writing style and near the end, Farewell to Arms which is one of his earliest novels.

I found his life absolutely fascinating. There is no doubt his good looks, charm and devil-may-care persona had a lot to do with his popularity as a writer. His upbringing was very strange and he definitely has his weaknesses, his alcohol abuse in later life caused much misery. I think the time he spent in Paris was the happiest time of his life.

Here is a link that might be useful: Hemingway as a writer/poet

I have read The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms and studied in an American Lit class The Old Man and the Sea. I liked the first three well enough just for the history but did not like Old Man at all. Too masculine for me, I guess. Do you think he ever really understood women?

We toured his house in Key West once and it was interesting, but I'm afraid what I mainly remember about Key West is the wonderful key lime pie.

Somewhere I have a biography of Hemingway, by an author whose name won't come to my mind, that includes a photograph of toddler Ernest with his older sister. In it they are dressed almost identically in frilly dresses and Ernest's hair is long and luxurious but without a hair bow like his sister had. In the early 1900s it was the style to dress infants and toddlers of both genders the same way, and sometimes it's hard to tell which gender a child was, but there's no mistaking Ernest was male in spite of the way he was attired. There was something in his eyes and his expression that broadcasted 'male'.

I have been accused of having a little too much sympathy for Hemingway by some of my female friends and family members who do not like his masculinity and his terse writing style. So be it, I am sympathetic. I have a feeling that a lot of his persona and bluster was put on, because he felt insecure for some reason -- and to have your world changed as his and so many young men of his generation was by war is enough to make a person feel insecure or hollow or dead inside, I think, and it naturally came out in his writing.

His style is journalistic, no doubt about that: you use as few words as possible to convey the most meaning as possible. I've always been very fond of adjectives, adverbs and subordinate clauses myself, so when I was no longer constrained I returned to using them with glee. However, Hemingway and some of the other 'moderns' were trying to distance themselves from the elaborateness of Victorian prose and cut things to the bone in doing so. Virginia Wolff did. Gertrude Stein, Hemingway's great friend, did.

Hemingway's style, though, may not have been his originally. There is much debate that his long-time editor, Maxwell Perkins, might have been the instigator of the Hemingway style. At any rate, Hemingway liked Perkins's advice and adopted it as his own thereafter, even to the point of trying to out Hemingway himself. It got to the point that it was worthy of ridicule, I think (and my thought is hardly original).

As Carolyn has, I've read The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls and I liked all three. But I also liked The Old Man and the Sea. I am fond of To Have and Have Not although that's considered a weaker novel by literary critics. I love A Moveable Feast and can reread it almost any time. Hemingway wrote the introduction to Kiki's Paris in an exuberate, un-Hemingway fashion that shows, I think, Janalyn, that you are right: it was the happiest period of his life.

I read A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea in high school (eons ago) and didn't exactly enjoy them, and now barely remember them. But I fell in love with The Sun Also Rises in college and re-read it several times as an adult.

I know part of the reason I love that book is the connection I made between it and James Mitchner's The Drifters which I read around the same time. There were lots of parallels -- wandering expats, Spain, the running of the bulls (which still fascinates me), and unhappy young people trying to find themselves. Mitchner, of course, used 1,000 words where Hemingway might use ten.

I think the anti-Semitism in The Sun Also Rises would make it uncomfortable to read now. I've wondered if this is all his books, or just this one?

It's now been over a decade since I've read any Hemingway at all. I'll have to put A Moveable Feast on the TBR list.

Dawn Powell based a recurring character, "Andrew Callingham", on Hemingway. Callingham makes occasional appearances in several Powell's novels. In Turn, Magic Wheel, a comically bittersweet novel, Callingham's first wife finds herself caring for his terminally ill second wife, while he is off honeymooning with wife number three. It is fascinating to see how Hemingway was viewed, and frequently lampooned, by his contemporaries.

My favorite Hemingway story: the newly-famous author was complaining to his Paris friends about how he had to wait behind a velvet rope at a famous Parisian restaurant. He concluded the story by saying something like "finally, I had to tell them who I was." Without missing a beat, Alice B. Toklas quipped "And who were you?". I love that story.

I love that Alice B. Toklas story!

I'm not a Hemingway fan. Maybe I've read too much about his life and how shabbily he sometimes treated people to be able to appreciate the work.

He appears to have been one of the writers our modern times are producing in ever-greater numbers--the Writer as Celebrity. I can recall spreads about him in Life magazine, which also serialized The Old Man and the Sea.

I get tired of the macho pose--the emphasis on bullfighting and war, for instance.

Some of his short stories--"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," say--are beautiful examples of tightly constructed, spare narrative.

But, yes, I do think he's been overrated.

I found little of the terse, journalistic style in "A Farewell to Arms." I thought his descriptions of the natural settings far too lengthy. And the suffering at the end just went on and on and on, down to every last gory detail.

I agree with jwttrans in that I dislike the macho posing.

I don't care for the writings of Gertrude Stein, either. I think of that generation, F.S. Fitzgerald is a cut above the rest. I've read a lot about Fitzgerald and Hemingway and their intense dislike for one another and the rivalry that went on in France.

I think of that generation, F.S. Fitzgerald is a cut above the rest.

Mary, it's interesting that you think that, as it's also interesting that Fitzgerald's reputation waned, after initial enthusiasm for his 'Jazz Age' representations, to the point that by the time of his death in 1940, his writing was dismissed as irrelevant. It took almost a generation for his writing to be resurrected and judged in an entirely different way.

Hemingway's writing, on the other hand, was much admired and lauded during his lifetime, only to be 'shot down' after his death by revised criticism. Feminists -- to give one example -- love (continue to love?) to revile Hemingway. It seems to be a cyclical thing, as so many things are.

I was reading some reviews at Amazon of books about Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's rivalry, and one reader noted that Hemingway's style shows up in every book by John Grisham and his ilk while Fitzgerald's style appears in the 'only the rich are interesting' romances that women love to read. I had to laugh at such a bald assertion because there's a lot of truth in it.

I would agree with you, Mary, that Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a cut above most writing of the 'moderns', but only Gatsby. I do not like The Beautiful and the Damned and The Last Tycoon because Fitzgerald seemed to be muddled in his obsession with the rich and the beautiful. I don't know how much of that was influenced by his alcoholism and his unhappy situation with Zelda, though.

It's easy for me to pity Fitzgerald, but not so easy for me to pity Hemingway although he undoubtedly had to live with his own demons. But I'm not going to take the feminist track and condemn Hemingway out of hand just because he sought sensation to alleviate his 'emptiness'. Other famous males of his time did much the same thing; the director/actor John Huston was also very macho.

I love the movie The Last Time I Saw Paris, which was based on Fitzgerald's short story Babylon Revisited. The story did not have the same ending as the movie, and I do prefer happy endings.

I have read this thread with great interest as I have recently rediscovered Hemingway after disliking the man and his work for most of my life. High school required reading and the mechanical, dry way of analyzing fiction that was the norm in schools of my time pretty much killed any enjoyment I might have had, although I did enjoy Old Man and the Sea. And the man's persona has been a turnoff to me - the sport hunting and fishing, womanizing, etc. But I have recently looked past that and read and reread a couple of his novels and have been pretty floored by the fine craftsmanship, and in reading a book of his letters, very impressed by his commitment to writing and the seriousness with which he worked. Maybe I just had to be older to understand and appreciate his work. And yes, A Moveable Feast is a book to read and reread - a wonderful time that is gone forever.