Hemingway: A Survey

When Ernest Hemingway died in 1961, his work was already beginning to fall out of critical favor—and off university syllabi. And yet he was indisputably the most famous writer in the world: the winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature and the best-selling author of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea. The ensuing decades have done little to dampen Hemingway's popular appeal (there are Hemingway writing contests, Hemingway drinking contests, and even a Hemingway furniture line). What are we to make of the longstanding rift between Hemingway's critical fortunes and his contemporary celebrity? Our course takes a broad view of Hemingway's life and work to explore these and other questions related to his literary craftsmanship and popular appeal. Students should expect to read extensively, not just the novels and short stories of Ernest Hemingway but the work of mentors and rivals like Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.