Hemingway, Ernest | Matthew C. Stewart (essay date spring 2000)
Matthew C. Stewart (essay date spring 2000)
SOURCE: Stewart, Matthew C. “Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting Recent Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War.” Papers on Language and Literature 36, no. 2 (spring 2000): 115-217.
[In the following essay, Stewart attempts to refute revisionist arguments about the influence of World War I on Hemingway's fiction.]
“Napoleon taught Stendahl how to write.”
—Ernest Hemingway
To ask whether or not the First World War had a profound effect upon Ernest Hemingway would, not so long ago, have been considered a rhetorical question. It can no longer be considered so, since the influential critics Kenneth S. Lynn and Frederick Crews have sought to dismiss the importance of World War I from Hemingway's life and fiction.1 The mainstream interpretation, which held sway well into the 1980s, had been advanced in most detail by...
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