Pedagogical approaches to the theme of war in Hemingway’s work

In 1925, Ernest Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald that “the reason you are so sore you missed the war is because the war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.” Though a world war veteran for seven years, at the time he wrote Fitzgerald, Hemingway had barely scratched the surface of his war experiences in his writing, yet it would be a subject he could never resist. As an eyewitness to the emergence of modern warfare, through the Second World War, and as a writer devoted to recreating experience on the page, Ernest Hemingway has gifted us with an oeuvre of wartime representation ideal for the classroom.

Teaching Hemingway and War offers fifteen original essays on Hemingway’s relationship to war with a variety of instructional settings in mind, and the contributors bring to the volume a range of experience, backgrounds, and approaches. Some of the topics included are:

• The Violence of Story: Teaching In Our Time and Narrative Rhetoric
• Hemingway’s Maturing View of the Spanish Civil War
• Robert Jordan’s Philosophy of War in For Whom the Bell Tolls
• Hemingway, PTSD, and Clinical Depression
• Perceptions of Pain in The Sun Also Rises
• Across the River and into the Trees as Trauma Literature

The final section provides three excellent undergraduate essays as examples of what students are capable of producing and as contributions to Hemingway studies in their own right.

Essays that explore Hemingway’s love for Spain

Ernest Hemingway famously called Spain “the country that I loved more than any other except my own,” and his forty-year love affair with it provided an inspiration and setting for major works from each decade of his career: The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Dangerous Summer, andThe Garden of Eden; his only full-length play, The Fifth Column; the Civil War documentary The Spanish Earth; and some of his finest short fiction, including “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

In Hemingway’s Spain, Carl P. Eby and Mark Cirino collect thirteen penetrating and innovative essays by scholars of different nationalities, generations, and perspectives who explore Hemingway’s writing about Spain and his relationship to Spanish culture and ask us in a myriad of ways to rethink how Hemingway imagined Spain—whether through a modernist mythologization of the Spanish soil, his fascination with the bullfight, his interrogation of the relationship between travel and tourism, his involvement with Spanish politics, his dialog with Spanish writers, or his appreciation of the subtleties of Spanish values. In addition to fresh critical responses to some of Hemingway’s most famous novels and stories, a particular strength of Hemingway’s Spain is its consideration of neglected works, such as Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War stories and The Dangerous Summer. The collection is noteworthy for its attention to how Hemingway’s post–World War II fiction revisits and reimagines his earlier Spanish works, and it brings new light both to Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War politics and his reception in Spain during the Franco years.

Hemingway’s lifelong engagement with Spain is central to under­standing and appreciating his work, and Hemingway’s Spain is an indispensable exploration of Hemingway’s home away from home.

Teaching Hemingway in his time

Teaching Hemingway and Modernism presents concrete, intertextual models for using Hemingway’s work effectively in various classroom settings, so students can understand the pertinent works, definitions, and types of avant-gardism that inflected his art. The fifteen teacher-scholars whose essays are included in the volume offer approaches that combine a focused individual treatment of Hemingway’s writing with clear links to the modernist era and offer meaningful assignments, prompts, and teaching tools.

The essays and related appendices balance text, context, and classroom practice while considering a broad and student-based audience. The contributors address a variety of critically significant questions—among them:

How can we view and teach Hemingway’s work along a spectrum of modernist avant-gardism?

How can we teach his stylistic minimalism both on its own and in conjunction with the more expansive styles of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, and other modernists?

What is postmodernist about an author so often discussed exclusively as a modernist, and how might we teach Hemingway’s work vis-à-vis that of contemporary authors?

How can teachers bridge twentieth- and twentyfirst- century pedagogies for Hemingway studies and American literary studies in high school, undergraduate, and graduate settings? What role, if any, should new media play in the classroom?

Teaching Hemingway and Modernism is an indispensable tool for anyone teaching Hemingway, and it offers exciting and innovative approaches to understanding one of the most iconic authors of the modernist era.

Ernest Hemingway’s initiation into war

Ernest Hemingway’s enlistment with the American Red Cross during World War I was one of the most formative experiences of his life, and it provided much of the source material for A Farewell to Arms and his writings about Italy and the Great War. As significant as it was, Hemingway’s service has never been sufficiently understood. By looking at previously unexamined documents, including the letters and diary of Hemingway’s commanding officer, Robert W. Bates, official reports of the ambulance and canteen services, and section newspapers published by volunteers, author Steven Florczyk provides crucial insights into Hemingway’s service.

The book opens by sharing tales of the volunteer ambulance units from the Western Front, which also led to the involvement of the American Red Cross in Italy. This was where Hemingway came to know many of the experienced drivers from France. In the spring of 1918 the young writer enlisted, serving first with an ambulance unit in Schio and then as a canteen worker at the Piave River until he was wounded. After the war when the volunteer outfits disbanded, Hemingway returned home where he took up his plan to earn a living as a writer.

Hemingway’s Red Cross experience was a major influence on his development as a writer and a thinker. Through the power of words, Hemingway’s journalism, short stories, and novels exposed the falsehoods of World War I propaganda. His involvement with the Red Cross led to some of the finest American literature on the Great War.

The profound impact of Cuba on Ernest Hemingway’s life and work

Ernest Hemingway resided in Cuba longer than he lived anywhere else in the world, yet no book has been devoted to how his life in Cuba influenced his writing. Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban Works corrects this omission by presenting contributions by scholars and journalists from the United States, Russia, Japan, and Cuba, who explore how Hemingway absorbed and wrote from the culture and place around him.

The volume opens with an examination of Hemingway’s place in Cuban history and culture, evaluations of the man and his work, and studies of Hemingway’s life as an American in Cuba. These essays look directly at Hemingway’s Cuban experience, and they range from the academic to the journalistic, allowing different voices to speak and different tones to be heard. The first section includes reflections from Gladys Rodriguez Ferrero, former director of the Museo Finco Vigía, who describes the deep affection Cubans hold for Hemingway; and recollections from the now-adult members of “Gigi’s All Stars,” the boys’ baseball team that Hemingway organized in the 1940s.

In the second part of the collection, Hemingway scholars— among them, Kim Moreland, James Nagel, Ann Putnam, and H. R. Stoneback—employ a variety of critical perspectives to analyze specific works set in Cuba or on its Gulf Stream and written during the years that Hemingway actually lived in Cuba. Also included are a long letter by Richard Armstrong describing the Machado revolution in Cuba and Hemingway’s photographs of fishermen at Cojimar, which provide vivid visual commentary on The Old Man and the Sea.

Appended to the collection are Kelli Larson’s bibliography of scholarly writing on Hemingway’s Cuban works and Ned Quevedo Arnaiz’s sample of Cuban writing on those works. A chronology placing Hemingway’s life in Cuba beside historical events is also provided.

This important volume illuminates Hemingway’s life and work during the Cuban years, and it will appeal to Hemingway fans and scholars alike.

Casts fresh light on the formative years of one of the twentieth century’s most important literary figures

Ernest Hemingway’s early adulthood (1917–1929) was marked by his work as a journalist, wartime service, marriage, conflicts with parents, expatriation, artistic struggle, and spectacular success. InWar + Ink, veteran and emerging Hemingway scholars, alongside experts in related fields, present pathbreaking research that provides important insights into this period of Hemingway’s life.

Comprised of sixteen elegantly written essays, War + Ink revisits Hemingway’s formative experiences as a cub reporter in Kansas City. It establishes a fresh set of contexts for his Italian adventure in 1918 and his novels and short stories of the 1920s, offers some provocative reflections on his fiction and the issue of truth-telling in war literature, and reexamines his later career in terms of themes, issues, or places tied to his early life. The essays vary in methodology, theoretical assumptions, and scope; what they share is an eagerness to question—and to look beyond—truisms that have long prevailed in Hemingway scholarship.

Highlights include historian Jennifer Keene’s persuasive analysis of Hemingway as a “typical doughboy,” Ellen Andrew Knodt’s unearthing of “Hemingwayesque” language spread throughout the correspondence penned by his World War I contemporaries, Susan Beegel’s account of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic and its previously unrecognized impact on the young Hemingway, Jennifer Haytock’s adroit analysis of “destructive spectatorship” inThe Sun Also Rises, Mark Cirino’s groundbreaking discussion of the instantaneous “life review” experienced by Hemingway’s dying characters (an intrusion of the speculative and the fantastic into fiction better known for its hard surfaces and harsh truths), and Matthew Nickel’s detailed interpretation of the significance of Kansas City in Across the River and Into the Trees. A trio of scholars—Celia Kingsbury, William Blazek, and Daryl Palmer—focus on “Soldier’s Home,” offering three very different readings of this quintessential narrative of an American soldier’s homecoming. Finally, Dan Clayton and Thomas G. Bowie reexamine Hemingway’s war stories in light of those told by today’s veterans.

War + Ink offers a cross section of today’s Hemingway scholarship at its best—and reintroduces us to a young Hemingway we only thought we knew.

A collection of essays tracing seven decades of literary interaction between Hemingway and notable French authors

In a 1946 Atlantic Monthly essay, Jean-Paul Sartre writes: “The greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, and Steinbeck.”

When Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1922, he was an unknown writer from America. The City of Light was where he learned his craft and gained legitimacy. Although much has been written about Hemingway’s apprentice years in Paris, little has been published about his literary convergences with French writers. In Hemingway and French Writers, Ben Stoltzfus illuminates the connections between Hemingway and the most important French intellectuals, such as Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux, and Albert Camus. A distinguished scholar of both French literature and Hemingway studies, Stoltzfus compares Hemingway’s major works in chronological order, fromThe Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea, with novels by French writers.

While it is widely known that France influenced Hemingway’s writing, Hemingway also had an immense impact on French writers. Over the years, American and French novelists enriched each other’s works with new styles and untried techniques. In this comparative analysis, Stoltzfus discusses the complexities of Hemingway’s craft, the controlled skill, narrative economy, and stylistic clarity that the French, drawn to his emphasis on action, labeled “le style américain.”

A social historical reading of Hemingway through the lens of race

William Faulkner has long been considered the great racial interrogator of the early-twentieth-century South. In Hemingway, Race, and Art, author Marc Kevin Dudley suggests that Ernest Hemingway not only shared Faulkner’s racial concerns but extended them beyond the South to encompass the entire nation. Though Hemingway wrote extensively about Native Americans and African Americans, always in the back of his mind was Africa. Dudley sees Hemingway’s fascination with, and eventual push toward, the African continent as a grand experiment meant to both placate and comfort the white psyche, and to challenge and unsettle it, too.

Twentieth-century white America was plagued by guilt in its dealings with Native Americans; simultaneously, it faced an increasingly dissatisfied African American populace. Marc Kevin Dudley demonstrates how Hemingway’s interest in race was closely aligned to a national anxiety over a changing racial topography. Affected by his American pedigree, his masculinity, and his whiteness, Hemingway’s treatment of race is characteristically complex, at once both a perpetuation of type and a questioning of white self-identity.

Hemingway, Race, and Art expands our understanding of Hemingway and his work and shows how race consciousness pervades the texts of one of America’s most important and influential writers.

First book-length study of the novel that transformed Hemingway scholarship

When The Garden of Eden appeared in 1986, roughly twenty-five years after Ernest Hemingway’s death, it was a watershed event that changed readers’ and scholars’ perceptions of the famous American author. Following five months in the life of protagonist David Bourne, a rising young writer of fiction, and his highly intelligent but artistically frustrated wife, Catherine, the novel is unique among Hemingway’s works. Its exploration of gender roles and identities, unconventional sexual practices, race, and artistic expression challenged the traditional notions scholars and readers had of the iconic writer, and it sparked a debate that has revolutionized Hemingway studies.

It was also the first of Hemingway’s posthumously published novels to garner a storm of criticism regarding the editing of its text. Many comparative studies have been done between the original manuscript, which contains over 2,000 pages, and its heavily edited published version, which has little over 200 pages. Despite the whirlwind surrounding The Garden of Eden, no book-length study of the novel has ever been published—until now.

In Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, editors Suzanne del Gizzo and Frederic J. Svoboda have collected the best essays and reviews—pieces that examine the novel’s themes, its composition and structure, and the complex issue of editing a manuscript for posthumous publication—and placed them in a single, cohesive volume. Among the included works are E. L. Doctorow’s famousNew York Times review “Braver Than We Thought,” a new essay by Tom Jenks examining his editing process in “Editing Hemingway: The Garden of Eden,” and Mark Spilka’s “Hemingway’s Barbershop Quintet: The Garden of EdenManuscript,” a precursor to his groundbreaking study of Hemingway’s concerns with sex and gender roles, Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny.

Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden is a must-read text for scholars, students, and readers of Hemingway.

“This is the story of a poor, young Cuban boy who grew into a man and gained the trust and respect of a famous American author, whom he loved like a father. A man he called ‘Papa.’’—from the Preface

In 1996 René Villarreal returned to Cuba to retrieve his memoir of his life with Ernest Hemingway at the Finca Vigia. Sadly, he learned that the manuscript and photographs had been lost. Determined to tell his story, Villarreal, together with his son Raúl, set about rewriting the account of how he came to be Ernest Hemingway’s majordomo, confidant, and friend—his Cuban son.

Hemingway, called El Americano by the Cubans, moved into the Finca Vigia, an estate outside of Havana, in 1939. He allowed the village children to play on his property, and they soon became fixtures, caring for his pets, performing odd jobs, and running errands. Hemingway recognized René as especially responsible and attentive and made him household manager, or majordomo, in 1946 when René was only seventeen.

For the next fifteen years, René ran the Finca, tending to Hemingway and his wife, Mary, and their visiting family and distinguished guests. Villarreal’s clear recollections offer up humorous stories of escapades and adventures with Hemingway as well as insightful comments on the writer’s work habits, moods, passions, and friendships. He also writes of Cuba before and after the revolution, capturing so well the sense of place and time. Scholars and readers of Hemingway worldwide will be caught up in this compelling story of a great friendship and will find insight into this complicated, fascinating, brilliant writer.