Ernest Hemingway : an analysis of his fiction

Abstract

A recent literary controversy flared into the open on October 28, 1954 when the administrators of the Nobel Foundation announced that the Price for Literature had been awarded to Ernest Hemingway with the citation reading: "For his powerful style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration as most recently evinced in The Old and and The Sea." The choice of Hemingway surprised many critics. Some were quick to point out that he had only written two books in the last ten years, one of which, Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) was, in critical concensus, an outright disappointment and, as Morton D. Zabel commented, "an occasion for little but exasperated depression." Alfred Kazin wrote of this nove: "It is hard to say what one feels most in reading this book - pity, embarrassment that so fine and honest a writer can make such a travesty of himself, or amazement that a man can render so marvellously the beauty of the natural world and yet be so vulgar... this book is different, for it is held together by blind anger rather than the lyric emotion that gives Hemingway's best work its unforgettable poignance."