KEY KEY INDIVIDUALS, LITERATURE: HEMINGWAY and FAULKNER

Hemingway and Faulkner were two key figures in American literature of the 'Roaring Twentieth'. They were the greatest writers, unique persons, and had a lot of similarities. Here you can read all about them, and also about similarities and differences in their lives and works.

http://www.csudh.edu/hux/syllabi/553/fau_1.html

My analyze of Hemingway's style and themes

Ernest Hemingway has become extremely popular with the help of his brilliant short stories. `”Cat in the Rain”, “Hills Like White Elephants”, and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” are the most popular short stories, but in spite of their shortness very deep ones. After having read these Hemingway’s works, you will be able to analyze his style at all.
What are the main characteristics of his manner of writing? Firstly, it’s simplicity. There are no long and tedious sentences, when you forget what it was about after read it to the end. Secondly, instead of long descriptions there are spontaneous dialogues and replicas. With the help of such a style it’s much more interesting to read his stories. You will enjoy yourself and improve your mood while reading. And thirdly, a very important human questions concerning life, love, and relationships between partners are hidden in them.
In his short stories Hemingway is genius. He raises such deep themes while describing common life situation. He was a real master, and his works are always up-to-date, like themes of love, relationships, and feeling of loneliness, which is the most important in his short stories. Why do people feel alone having a husband or a wife? This was the most important question for Hemingway in his works. May be, it was the most urgent problem for him. Hemingway was married 4 times; he couldn’t find happiness and real love, so he was lonely during all his life. I guess, it was the main reason, why he has written so many works dealing with the theme of unhappiness and loneliness.
Being lovely and important is the most necessary things for all the people. And there is no matter if you are woman or man. Personally I think that it’s much more important to feel yourself important for men rather than for women. Than they become stronger and happier. It’s only an ability of women to make them “real” men.
Hemingway especially has raised this theme of feeling important in his short story “Cat in the Rain”. A young girl, who has a rich husband still are so lonely. She is like that cat in the rain, whose owner just forgot about it. May be, she also sees herself in this cat and so wants to take it home. And it’s not a common whim (but it seems like that), it’s a wish to feel important and lovely. She wanted that her husband took his newspaper away and did something for her. She hasn’t asked for diamantes, it was just a cat…and he didn’t want to do it for her.
After having read his stories men will say that all the women are so uncertain, they never know what they really want. It’s one of their faults, and because of this there are so many divorces. And all the women will understand the moral!

The characters in Hemingway's short stories

It's very interesting to know, why there are too little named charecters in Hemingway's short stories? May be, the personality of a character is more important for him than his/her name? But, it always considered that the name is one of the most uniqe things that differs people....???
Macomber’s beautiful wife, whom he married because of her beauty, secretly despises Macomber because she knows that he married her for one reason only: She is his “trophy wife.” She despises herself because she knows that she married him for one reason only: He is very rich. He will never divorce her because he values her beauty; she will never divorce him because she has become comfortable with being a very rich wife.

Therefore, Margot is delighted when Macomber proves to be such a weakling and runs from the lion; it gives her psychological control over him. It’s something that she can goad him with. However, when Macomber is about to reclaim his manhood as he faces the water buffalo, she is so frightened of losing control over him that she fires (or perhaps pretends to fire) at the charging water buffalo—and, instead, shoots her husband.


Macomber is thirty-five years old, very tall and well built, at the apex of his manhood—fit and good at court games (by “court games,” Hemingway is referring to tennis or squash, games in which there are rules and perimeters for the game). Now, however, the very wealthy and very handsome Macomber has come on safari to hunt wild game. This is no court game. There are no perimeters here—and few rules. The jungle is endless, and the law is the law of the jungle—or the law of the survivor, the fittest.

When the story opens, Macomber has returned from a lion hunt. He is hailed as a hero, but we discover that when confronted with the lion, he ran. Macomber’s wife saw him become a distraught coward. Wilson, their British guide, witnessed the event. Macomber has to reclaim a sense of manhood for himself and regain their admiration. He has his chance when he is face-to-face with a charging water buffalo. His courage is magnificent—and then he is shot, at the very moment when he feels happier than he’s felt in years. His short, happy life flares up, then dies, quickly.

Nick Adams is the name that Hemingway gave to the fictional persona, largely autobiographical, whom he often wrote about. Like Hemingway himself, Nick is the son of a doctor (“The Indian Camp”; “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”); he relishes fishing and hunting in the northern peninsula of Michigan (“Big Two-Hearted River”). He romances a young girl named Marjorie, a summer waitress at a summer resort (“The End of Something”; “The Three-Day Blow”). He goes abroad during World War I and serves as an American Red Cross ambulance driver; he also is a courier, carrying chocolates and cigarettes to Italian soldiers on the Austro-Italian battlefront. And, like Hemingway, Nick suffers a knee wound (“In Another Country”). Unlike Hemingway, however, Nick suffered post-traumatic shock; his mind periodically seems to come unhinged (“A Way You’ll Never Be”).

In all, Hemingway wrote at least a dozen stories that center around Nick Adams, and in 1972, Scribner’s published a volume entitled The Nick Adams Stories.
In each of the Nick Adams stories, Nick witnesses—or is a part of—some traumatic event, and Hemingway reveals Nick’s reaction to that event. For example, in “Indian Camp,” Hemingway focuses on Nick’s reaction to a young American Indian man’s slitting his throat from ear to ear after listening to his young wife scream for two days and then scream even more during Dr. Adams’ cesarean that delivers a baby boy. In “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” Nick’s blind hero-worship of his father is contrasted with our knowledge that Nick’s father has a fraudulent aspect to his character. “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow” revolve around Nick’s breaking off with his girlfriend, Marjorie. Nick is not entirely happy with himself afterward; Nick’s friend Bill prodded him to break up with her, and, finally, Nick secretly rejoices that he need not be as thoroughly against marriage as Bill is: Romance and women can still be tantalizing; they need not be shackles on a man’s future success.
Nick’s stay in Summit, Illinois, in “The Killers” ends when he is forced to witness a former prizefighter calmly await certain death by two hired killers. When Nick was a boy, he vowed never to be afraid of death, never to be like the young American Indian husband who “couldn’t stand” life’s demands. Yet here, Nick leaves Summit. He can’t stand to remain in a town where a man lacks the courage to do battle with death—even certain death.
“Big Two-Hearted River” follows Nick after he returns to Michigan from the Italian front during World War I. He takes a train to the upper peninsula and hikes to a stream where he will camp and fish and be alone, where he will slowly perform the rote motions of self-sustaining chores, peeling away the trauma and the scars from his ragged, wounded spirit and newly empowering himself with the healing powers of nature’s rituals.

Hemingway does not tell us Harry’s last name; we know only that he is a writer and that he and his wife, Helen, are on a safari in East Africa. Their truck has malfunctioned, and, while trying to fix it, Harry scratched himself and neglected applying iodine to the scratch. Now, gangrene has begun to eat away at the flesh on his right leg. The stench is overpowering. However, he’s not in pain—physical pain. All of his pain seems to be emotional pain of the seemingly sure knowledge that he is dying—and, worse than dying, he’s dying without having written many stories that he’d planned to write.

Why didn’t he write these stories? Harry believes that it was probably because he married a woman with a fortune. Her money poisoned his writing future, just as surely as gangrene is now poisoning his body and gnawing away at the few days of life that he has left.
When Harry is not being sarcastically savage to Helen, he drifts in and out of interior monologue flashbacks, remembering and recalling people and geography and incidents that he’s kept in his scrapbook of memories. They will die with him. No one will ever write about them now.

Helen. Harry’s wife seems almost saint-like, especially when compared with her dying husband. She does everything she can to make his illness more comfortable. She is genuinely concerned with his failing strength and tries to give him hope and courage.

Hemingway's style

A great deal has been written about Hemingway’s distinctive style. In fact, the two great stylists of twentieth-century American literature are William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, and the styles of the two writers are so vastly different that there can be no comparison. For example, their styles have become so famous and so individually unique that yearly contests award prizes to people who write the best parodies of their styles. The parodies of Hemingway’s writing style are perhaps the more fun to read because of Hemingway’s ultimate simplicity and because he so often used the same style and the same themes in much of his work.

From the beginning of his writing career in the 1920s, Hemingway’s writing style occasioned a great deal of comment and controversy. Basically, a typical Hemingway novel or short story is written in simple, direct, unadorned prose. Possibly, the style developed because of his early journalistic training. The reality, however, is this: Before Hemingway began publishing his short stories and sketches, American writers affected British mannerisms. Adjectives piled on top of one another; adverbs tripped over each other. Colons clogged the flow of even short paragraphs, and the plethora of semicolons often caused readers to throw up their hands in exasperation. And then came Hemingway.
An excellent example of Hemingway’s style is found in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In this story, there is no maudlin sentimentality; the plot is simple, yet highly complex and difficult. Focusing on an old man and two waiters, Hemingway says as little as possible. He lets the characters speak, and, from them, we discover the inner loneliness of two of the men and the callous prejudices of the other. When Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954, his writing style was singled out as one of his foremost achievements. The committee recognized his “forceful and style-making mastery of the art of modern narration.”
Hemingway has often been described as a master of dialogue; in story after story, novel after novel, readers and critics have remarked, “This is the way that these characters would really talk.” Yet, a close examination of his dialogue reveals that this is rarely the way people really speak. The effect is accomplished, rather, by calculated emphasis and repetition that makes us remember what has been said.
Perhaps some of the best of Hemingway’s much-celebrated use of dialogue occurs in “Hills Like White Elephants.” When the story opens, two characters—a man and a woman—are sitting at a table. We finally learn that the girl’s nickname is “Jig.” Eventually we learn that they are in the cafe of a train station in Spain. But Hemingway tells us nothing about them—or about their past or about their future. There is no description of them. We don’t know their ages. We know virtually nothing about them. The only information that we have about them is what we learn from their dialogue; thus this story must be read very carefully.
This spare, carefully honed and polished writing style of Hemingway was by no means spontaneous. When he worked as a journalist, he learned to report facts crisply and succinctly. He was also an obsessive revisionist. It is reported that he wrote and rewrote all, or portions, of The Old Man and the Sea more than two hundred times before he was ready to release it for publication.
Hemingway took great pains with his work; he revised tirelessly. “A writer’s style,” he said, “should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous.” Hemingway more than fulfilled his own requirements for good writing. His words are simple and vigorous, burnished and uniquely brilliant.

Hello,everybodydy!
I'm happy to join the group at last! First of all I'd like to say that I 'm very enthuisiastic about the theme of our blog as we have allready got acquianted with the author's works. I have found some information concerned with William Faulkner and I would be glad to share it with you. I got to know that Faulkner has a remarkable biography, he managed to achieve his goals by himself. And his only dream, as I have understood, was to write, and write not for money , but for pleasure. Certainly, at first he tried to earn money by writing for publishes but then he was not very successful. But nevertheless some time passed and William refused to ingritiate himself with the requirements of publishers. He gained a lot of useful experiance during this time and perhaps due to this expirience was able to become a Noble Prize Laureatte.
It's interesting to mention that besides writing short stories and novels Faulkner was a screenwriter in Hollywood. At this time he begins to get a considerable sums of money. One of his story "Turn about"was adapted by him for the film. The film was released as Today We Live.
It's also necessary to add that he participated in social issues . In particular, he argued in several public letters that southern blacks must receive equal rights, in general Faulkner's moderate liberalism angered everyone.
So that's all information I have found for today. I'll be glad to go on looking for more information about him.

Hello, everybody! Sorry for having left no posts at this blog for a long period of time, though it is one of my main duties. First of all, I’d like to say that our group decided to change our topic a bit. We decided to take only William Faulkner as a Nobel Prize Laureate. It would be fair to mention that it was Olya’s initiative. I usually have no exact preferences in literature (and not only there). Certainly, I like some writers more than others but I often find something really interesting and useful in each of the books I’ve ever read. So it was quite difficult for me to choose only one of the numerous talented and outstanding American writers. Olya was so impressed by William Faulkner and his works that we just couldn’t stay indifferent. We became completely absorbed in her excitement. Next week I’m going to read some of his short stories and especially I would like to read “Intruder in the Dust”. I’ve heard nothing about it before but the title of the novel promises something interesting.
I also can’t keep in my impressions after having read some of the stories written by Ernest Hemingway. I really liked it very much. I’ve never thought that his stories are so simple on the one hand, but so deep on the other. He describes the relationship between people and their feelings so unconstrainedly and clearly. Every thought and feeling of the characters in his stories seems to be evident though in real life we rarely think of what stands behind different words that people tell each other, behind different actions. Now I’m grateful to our course on American literature because without it I would hardly read it. And now it’s my turn to stimulate your desire to get acquainted with the stories of such an outstanding writer. Perhaps I was not too persuasive but I hope there will be some result.

William Faulkner: The Faded Rose of Emily

http://www.mrrena.com/misc/emily.shtml This is the work of famous critics about Faulkner's the best novel....

I'd like to add some information about Southern Gothic and modernism, streams that Faulkner belongs to, and also about famous people who influenced his creativity! This chapter will be pulished in a week....

Before reading Faulkner's works look through its characteristics and then choose the most interesting one

Works by William Faulkner (1897-1962)
1924
The Marble Faun. Faulkner's first book is a collection of pastoral verse that sells so poorly that most of the five-hundred-copy edition is remaindered to a bookstore for ten cents a copy. Sherwood Anderson, whom Faulkner would meet in New Orleans in 1925, helped convince Faulkner that his talent lay in writing prose.
1926
Soldiers' Pay. Faulkner's first novel, about a disfigured American flyer's painful homecoming to Georgia, is published with the assistance of Sherwood Anderson, who supposedly agreed to recommend it to his publisher under the condition that he would not have to read the book.
1927
Mosquitoes. Faulkner's second novel assembles a mixed group of characters on the yacht of a New Orleans matron for conversations on literature and sex. Daring for its time in its references to masturbation, lesbianism, and syphilis, the book, according to critic Cleanth Brooks, "is Faulkner's least respected novel, and it is easy to see why... there is almost no story here; nothing of real consequence happens to any of its characters." The book retains a biographical relevance in expressing Faulkner's view of the New Orleans literary scene.
1929
Sartoris. Faulkner's third novel, an abridgment of the unpublished The Flags in the Dust, is his first work set in Yoknapatawpha County, the imagined equivalent of the author's native northern Mississippi. It traces Bayard Sartoris's return home from the war, haunted by the death of his twin and his aristocratic Southern family's legacy. The novel introduces themes, settings, and characters that would dominate Faulkner's books from then on. Faulkner also publishes The Sound and the Fury, which presents the disintegration of the Southern patrician Compson family through stream-of-consciousness interior monologues of the three Compson sons--the idiot Benjy, the incestuously haunted Quentin, and the grasping Jason--concerning their relationship with their fallen sister, Caddy. The fourth section is an objective account focusing on the Compson's black cook, Dilsey. It is the first of Faulkner's technically innovative narratives and one of his greatest achievements.
1930
As I Lay Dying. Faulkner's most experimentally daring novel, written over a six-week period when Faulkner was working the night shift at a powerhouse, is a multivocal stream-of-consciousness account of the poor white Bundren family's journey to bury their mother, Addie, in her native town, Jefferson, Mississippi. The book combines horror, comedy, and a profound meditation on the nature of being.
1931
Sanctuary. Failing to reach the public with his previous novels, Faulkner set out to write a potboiler--"the most horrific tale I could imagine"--to make money. Composed in three weeks (but substantially reworked by a shocked Faulkner when he received the galleys), the story of Temple Drake's rape and torture by the sadistic psychopath Popeye becomes Faulkner's only bestseller. Also published in 1931 is the story collection These 13, including some of his greatest stories, such as "Victory," "Red Leaves," and "A Rose for Emily."
1932
Light in August. One of Faulkner's greatest novels concerns the tragic ramifications of the purportedly mixed-blood heritage of the outcast Joe Christmas and the rigidity and alienation of a large cast of memorable characters, including New England liberal Joanna Burden, disgraced minister Gail Hightower, and seduced-and-abandoned country girl Lena Grove.
1933
A Green Bough. The writer, who would regard himself as a "failed poet," publishes his second and last poetry collection.
1934
Doctor Martino, and Other Stories. Faulkner's story collection includes "Fox Hunt," "Smoke," "Mountain Victory," and "Honor."
1935
Pylon. Between the masterful Light in August (1934) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner publishes what is generally regarded as a minor work about aviators during a Mardi Gras celebration.
1936
Absalom, Absalom! Regarded by many as the writer's masterpiece, this complex, multivocal novel depicts the fall of the house of Mississippi's Thomas Sutpen and reflects American and Southern history before, during, and after the Civil War.
1938
The Unvanquished. Faulkner groups previously published short stories into a narrative chronicling the Sartoris family of Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
1939
The Wild Palms. Two stories centered on the precariousness of love juxtapose a New Orleans doctor's tragic affair with a married woman and a convict's relationship with a pregnant hill woman during a flood.
1940
The Hamlet. The first of a trilogy that includes The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1960), the novel covers the rise to power of the grasping, corrupt Flem Snopes and his kin in Faulkner's imagined county in Mississippi.
1942
Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. Faulkner's short story collection deals with the McCaslin clan and includes one of his most admired works, "The Bear." Reviewers alternately recognize evidence of Faulkner's maturity and greatness as a writer and express their irritation at the "hopelessly tangled skeins" of his sentences, creating opaqueness rather than lucidity.
1946
The Portable Faulkner. This selection and arrangement of Faulkner's work, edited by Malcolm Cowley, is widely credited with reviving interest in the writer, most of whose books were out of print by 1946.
1948
Intruder in the Dust. In a working out of Faulkner's response to the South's "Negro Problem" (as it was called at the time), Lucas Beaucamp, a black Mississippi farmer, is charged with the murder of a white man. He is eventually cleared by black and white teenagers and a spinster from an old Southern family.
1949
Knight's Gambit. A story collection featuring country attorney Gavin Stephens in Faulkner's version of the detective genre. According to critic Malcolm Cowley, the work is "the slightest... and the pleasantest of all the books that Faulkner has published."
1950
Collected Stories. These forty-two stories represent what, according to Faulkner, constitutes his achievement as a short story writer. The stories are arranged with care into six thematic units that provide a key to the author's intentions. The collection is universally praised and receives the National Book Award.
1951
Requiem for a Nun. This sequel to Sanctuary is yet another of Faulkner's experiments with novelistic form. Three prose sections providing historical background are interspersed with three others constituting a three-act play. The story concerns the fate of Nancy Mannigoe, a black nurse accused of murdering a white child.
1954
A Fable. Faulkner's novel is a long parable about the passion of Christ, set during World War I. Faulkner had labored for years over the novel and considered it his masterwork. Although it wins the Pulitzer Prize, later critics would deem it one of his weakest books.
1955
Big Woods. Faulkner's collection brings together his previously printed hunting stories--"The Bear," "The Old People," and "A Bear Hunt"--with a new story, "Ride at Morning," as well as the author's explanatory comments.
1957
The Town. The second installment of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy appears seventeen years after the first volume, The Hamlet (1940). The novel focuses on an outsider, the lawyer Gavin Stevens, and his naive longing for two of the Snopes women. Narration by another outsider, the itinerant sewing machine salesman V. K. Ratliff, integrates The Town with its predecessor in the trilogy. The set would be completed with the 1960 publication of The Mansion.
1958
New Orleans Sketches. This book collects Faulkner's experimental prose pieces written in 1925, marking his transition from poetry to fiction.
1959
The Mansion. Faulkner concludes his trilogy on the Snopes family, begun with The Hamlet (1940) and continued in The Town (1957). The novel shows a prosperous Flem Snopes and the vengeance of his cousin Mink, which ends Flem's career.
1962
The Reivers: A Reminiscence. Published one month before his death, Faulkner's final novel is a nostalgic last look at Yoknapatawpha County in a comic tale set in 1905. It wins Faulkner a second Pulitzer Prize.
1965
Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters. This collection includes Faulkner's review of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, lectures, introductions, essays on various writers including Sherwood Anderson and Albert Camus, impressions of Japan and New England, and comments about social issues such as race relations.

Would you like to know more about Faulkner?

There are some frequently asked question about William Faulkner: his biography and literary works. Here you see the list of them and answers!

http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/wf-faq.html#yokrealword

William Faulkner: Primary Sources

Now, when I have already gathered some information about William Faulkner, I think it's a high time to read some his works. I'm sure that William Faulkner impressed everyone, he was really a very talented American writer who managed to become a Nobel Prizer . But you'll be more impressed while acquainting with his novels and short stories!!!
http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/lib_ps.html