Ernest Hemingway: King of Manly Writers

Copyright © 2005 by Jim Mahood. All rights reserved.

“It wasn’t about anything, something about making punch, and then we started fighting and I slipped and he had me down kneeling on my chest and choking me with both hands like he was trying to kill me and all the time I was trying to get the knife out of my pocket to cut him loose.”

This line launches Ernest Hemingway’s “After the Storm” in his popular collection Winner Take Nothing, first published in 1933 but still fresh in 2005 and soon to be reissued for the umpteenth time.

Hemingway (also called Hem and Papa) sculpted first lines so packed with action and adventure they seize you by the throat and thrust you into the middle of an ongoing story—a sign you’re in the hands of an expert storyteller, in Hem’s case a great storyteller.

You remember Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), he was and remains the king of manly writers. In addition to Winner Take Nothing, his most famous short fiction, novels, and nonfiction include the following:

• In Our Time, 1924, short stories on war and bullfighting. Nick Adams, the central character, is Hemingway’s alter ego.

• The Sun Also Rises, 1926. Arguably Hem’s greatest novel, renders the Lost Generation of Americans who had fought in France during World War I then expatriated themselves.

• Men without Women, 1927, short masterpieces of description, dialogue, and atmosphere, including his most anthologized story “The Killers,” in which the focus is not the hired hit men but the effect on Nick Adams of the victim’s acceptance of his own violent end. The aura of impending doom will raise your hackles.

• A Farewell to Arms, 1929, one of the world’s most skillful novels about the tragedy and destruction of World War I, perhaps all wars: “You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you” (Chapter 41).

• Death in the Afternoon, 1932, nonfiction. Bullfighting up close and personal. “I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after” (Chapter 1).

• Green Hills of Africa, 1935, big game hunting. The book where Hem famously wrote, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” (Chapter 1).

• To Have and Have Not, 1937, novel. During the Great Depression, Harry Morgan can’t fill his boat with big game fishermen, so he turns to smuggling Chinese immigrants and illegal liquor. He dies gasping, “One man alone ain’t got . . . no chance.”

• The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1938. A short story about a writer, Harry, who is kept by a wealthy woman. Harry goes on safari in Africa to “work the fat off his mind” and force himself to write. Instead, he develops gangrene in his leg. Just before he dies, he reviews his life and dreams of a giant frozen leopard on the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro—one of the most compelling images in literature of a talented author frozen with writer’s block.

• For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940, novel about an idealistic American college professor who joins a band of guerrilla fighters during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). His mission is to dynamite a strategic bridge. He falls in love with a young Spanish woman who was raped by Fascists. They share three passionate days and nights before he successfully blows the bridge but is wounded and left to die.

• The Old Man and The Sea, 1952. After 84 days at sea without a catch, an old Cuban fisherman hooks a giant marlin, fights it for two days, then reels it alongside to harpoon and tow to port. Sharks appear. Fighting them off, the old man breaks his knife. This leaves the sharks free to eat all but the head of his huge fish—but, Hemingway writes, “a man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

In fiction, nonfiction, plays, films, and poems, Hemingway writes again and again of women, wine, adventure, bravery, hunting, fishing, fighting, war, death and wraps them all up in a distinctive style that is blade sharp, diamond clear, succinct, unadorned—manly writing that is bold, strong, and true.

This review was originally published in the October 2005 issue of The Thurston-Mason Senior News.