{"id":9835,"date":"2014-10-29T08:19:17","date_gmt":"2014-10-29T15:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=9835"},"modified":"2014-10-27T15:20:52","modified_gmt":"2014-10-27T22:20:52","slug":"lit-matters-hemingways-tragic-life-changed-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2014\/10\/29\/lit-matters-hemingways-tragic-life-changed-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Matters<\/em>: Hemingway\u2019s tragic life changed literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.\u201d<\/p>\n

This statement is typical of Ernest Hemingway, who was almost as famous for his bravado lifestyle as for changing the course of modern literature.<\/p>\n

Born in 1899, Hemingway killed himself in 1961 after inventing a whole new way of writing fiction. His influence on subsequent generations was so great that American novelist Norman Mailer joked, \u201cI almost wouldn\u2019t trust a young novelist who doesn\u2019t imitate Hemingway in his youth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

His style, famous for its short, declarative sentences, won him the Nobel Prize in 1954. The settings of his stories and novels were often taken from personal experience: deep-sea fishing, driving an ambulance in WWI, reporting on the Spanish Civil War, and watching bullfighting, for example.<\/p>\n

A Moveable Feast<\/i>, his literary memoir about hobnobbing with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris in the \u201920s, is a classic of bohemian literature.<\/p>\n

Hemingway\u2019s clear and simple writing is what makes him so enjoyable as a storyteller. His worlds are instantly familiar, his characters all true to life.<\/p>\n

But the simplicity of the writing is deceptive.<\/p>\n

Hemingway\u2019s genius was not in what he included, although each word was meticulously chosen to create the \u201ctruest\u201d image. It shows in what he left out.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnything you can omit that you know<\/i>, you will still have in the writing and its quality will show,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

This addition by subtraction, strengthening the narrative by allowing readers to fill in with parts of their own experience, has come to be called the Iceberg Theory of composition.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dignity of movement of an iceberg,\u201d wrote Hemingway, \u201cis due to only one-eighth of it being above water.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hemingway\u2019s apparently simple descriptions give evidence of a richness of plot, character, and thought lurking just below the page.<\/p>\n

Hemingway must-read: A\u00a0<\/em>Moveable Feast\u00a0<\/i>(Lansdowne library code:\u00a0PS 3515 E37 Z475).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.\u201d This statement is typical of Ernest Hemingway, who was almost as famous for his bravado lifestyle as for changing the course of modern literature. Born in 1899, Hemingway killed himself in 1961 after inventing a whole new way of writing fiction. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,134],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-october-29-2014"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9835"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9839,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9835\/revisions\/9839"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}