1950's The Arts | Hemingway, Ernest 1899-1961

WRITER

Celebrity.

No literary figure during the 1950s, or any other decade in American history, achieved a degree of literary celebrity equal to that of Ernest Hemingway. Tough, experienced, independent-minded, action-seeking, hard-drinking, and photogenic, he rep-resented the full romance of authorship for readers of the time.

Fading Reputation.

To many literary critics, though, he seemed through as a writer at the beginning of the decade, and if there was any suspicion that he still might have a spark of creative genius left, his novel Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) dispelled it. He had, it seemed, entered the phase of his life given over to accepting awards for past achievements.

The Old Man and the Sea.

Then came The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Hemingway's twenty-seven-thousand-word short novel (one-third to one-half the length of the average novel)...