You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
1999 marks the centenary of Ernest Hemingway's birth, and we can look forward to a spate of new articles, books, professional conferences, and films celebrating the best known writer of the century. One can think of no other author whose name has become synonymous with a heroic ideal. His fictional protagonists—Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the simple fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea—exemplify a code of behavior that millions of men have imitated with varying degrees of success. Hemingway was himself a larger-than-life figure whose greatest fictional creation was his own public persona of heroic invincibility and disdain of death. He was not the greatest American novelist of the century—William Faulkner was—but he was the most influential, effecting a revolution in prose comparable to that achieved by Coleridge and Wordsworth in poetry a century ago. Norman Mailer observed that Hemingway's suicide in 1961 was the most difficult death in America since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's—a tribute to the novelist's ability to seize the popular imagination.
Anyone who studies Hemingway's life and art confronts dizzying contradictions and paradoxes. One cannot make a statement