Where to Start With Ernest Hemingway

Short answer: Start with the short stories — “Hills Like White Elephants,” “Big Two-Hearted River” — where Hemingway’s revolutionary style is purest, then read The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. He is the most imitated prose stylist of the twentieth century, and the originals still cut deeper than any imitation.

The style that changed everything

Hemingway did something so influential it is now nearly invisible: he stripped English prose to the bone. Out went the ornate sentence, the elaborate description, the authorial commentary; in came short declarative sentences, concrete nouns, plain verbs, and a vast amount left unsaid. His “iceberg theory” held that the deepest meaning should stay beneath the surface — that what you leave out is what gives a story its power. This was not a mannerism but a moral position. It grew out of his distrust, after the First World War, of the big abstract words — glory, honour, sacrifice — that had been used to send his generation into the trenches. Almost all modern minimalist prose descends from him.

Start with the stories

The style is purest and most astonishing in the short fiction. “Hills Like White Elephants” tells an entire wrenching story — a couple deciding whether to end a pregnancy — almost entirely through evasive small talk about drinks and hills and trains, never once naming the subject. The weight of an entire relationship, the whole question of what love means when it asks of one partner a sacrifice the other cannot acknowledge, is carried in roughly fifteen hundred words that appear to be about nothing. It is a masterclass in how much can be conveyed by what is withheld. Read the early stories first; they teach you how to read everything else he wrote.

Then the novels

The Sun Also Rises is the defining novel of the disillusioned post-war Lost Generation — expatriates drinking their way through Paris and Pamplona, wounded in body and spirit, the whole book organised around a wound that is never quite named. A Farewell to Arms is his great war-and-love tragedy, where Catherine’s death arrives as casually and unceremoniously as the shell that wounded Hemingway himself in Italy. Both show the style in full: spare on the surface, devastating underneath.

Reading past the myth

Hemingway the man — the hunting, the bullfights, the macho legend — has obscured Hemingway the artist, who was far more delicate and wounded than the image suggests. The bullfight, to which he returned all his life, was for him not swagger but a formal model: a public, ceremonial confrontation with death that refuses to pretend the death is not happening. Read the work and you find not a swaggerer but a writer obsessed with grief, fear, and the struggle to behave well in a world that offers no comfort. Meet him in the early writing, before the legend hardened around him — and read him beside his great rival and friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the other laureate of the same exiled decade.

Read the Essential Early Hemingway →

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