Word: hemingways
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...HAVE AND HAVE NOT-Ernest Hemingway-Scribners...
...eyes of the polite world, Ernest Hemingway has much to answer for. Armed with the hardest-hitting prose of the century, he has used his skill and power to smash rose-colored spectacles right & left, to knock many a genteel pretence into a sprawling grotesque. Detractors have called him a bullying bravo, have pointed out that smashing spectacles and pushing over a pushover are not brave things to do. As the "lost generation" he named* have grown greyer and more garrulous, so his own invariably disillusioned but Spartan books have begun to seem a little dated; until it began...
...among the more conscientious watchers of U. S. letters, the question still smouldered: What's to happen to Hemingway? On the twin assumptions that (1) once an author had chosen a given field he could not depart from it, and hence (2) once he had exhausted that field or the public had tired of it, he was through as a writer, Hemingway was through. He had made himself the principal spokesman of the violence, aimlessness, brutality of war and the wartime generation. Violence, aimlessness, brutality were pretty well washed up as literary material. Ergo, Hemingway too was washed...
...Hemingway himself did little to encourage any other attitude. With The Sun Also Rises (1926), Men Without Women (1927) and Farewell to Arms (1929), he had found himself in the unique position of being not only a best-seller but also a writer whom first-line critics intensely admired and respected. Younger writers all imitated him. Wielder of a style of unmatched clarity and precision, master of the art of conveying emotions, particularly violent ones, with an effect almost of first-hand experience, he seemed to have established himself as the most powerful direct influence on contemporary literature. After these...
...McNeill-Moss's factually authoritative but notably pro-Rebel account of one of the most heroic episodes in Spain's civil war (The Siege of Alcazar; Knopf: $3.50), Sommerfield's book is unpretentious historically, uninsistent politically, is marred only by a too-obvious leaning towards Ernest Hemingway in style. It provides an excellent report of one man's experiences, impressions, in battle, offers in two or three of its episodes descriptions hardly-to-be-forgotten of life in wartime. For these in particular, most readers will find it valuable...