Word: hemingways
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This topsy-turvy theme of belief triumphing over death runs through all American literature, from Bradford to Hemingway. It is the American's consolation that if he fails with his vision, he can persist in his belief. Perhaps these tendencies sound old and no longer applicable. Well, in a sense the Jonestown tale was sketched out a century ago. Consider Moby Dick: Is not there some deep similarity between Jones and Ahab? Ahab, leading his crew in a suicidal pursuit, testing himself against all the supernatural forces; Jones, carrying his group with him in his strange quest. How did both...
...Sporting Club, The Bushwhacked Piano and Ninety-Two in the Shade) certified him as a young man on the way to becoming a Major American Writer, one of the four or five best of his generation (he is now 38). McGuane, ran the critics' early form, was Hemingway by way of the drug generation...
With the easy wisdom of hindsight, it is simple enough to cast the young Perkins as the great innovator; and yet, Perkins did not completely share the enthusiasm of writers like Hemingway and Pound for building all literature anew. Perkins, above all, was searching for what Fitzgerald called "the real thing," for Max clung to no dogmatic view of literature and asked only for writing that would vicariously bring readers a little closer to real life...
Perkins found in Fitzgerald a man whose writing captured the spirit of The Jazz Age--even though Perkins was a little skeptical of all those flappers--in Hemingway someone who lived the exciting kind of life that Perkins so admired, and in Wolfe a man who had come to a strong, profound understanding of America and its people...
Lovers of Hemingway. Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Lardner and company will devour Berg's book if for nothing more than the anecdotes about the writers. Though Berg adds little to the voluminous scholarship on these writers, there emerges from Perkins' letters and trivia a picture of the writers maintained over and over again that they didn't give a damn about what the critics said; but they always listened to Perkins' advice and--as the letters show--followed it closely. Perkins, of course, remained equally loyal to his writers, giving a seemingly limitless supply of encouragement, advice and advance money from...