At first glance it might seem a bit of cultural dissonance to refer to one of the most famous American authors by a term that only came into popularity some years after he died. Yet, in many ways, Hemingway's life and career was the template for so many to be called rock stars in the decades immediately following his death in 1961.
Hemingway is well placed on our list of top 20 most famous American authors . He deserves his place for his literary accomplishments, but the significance of his literary achievement is transcended by his role as the model of artistic celebrity that shaped the 20th century.
Hemingway would still have qualified for registration at most youth hostels when his brooding and anguished novella of restless ennui, The Sun Also Rises, became an instant darling of the literary critics. Then, miraculously, only three years later, still soaking up the glow of critical acclaim, his novel, A Farewell to Arms, became a popular best seller. And this new best seller status was backed by a pair of short story collections, in the years just prior and subsequent to the novel that revealed Hemingway as nothing less than the re-inventor the short story form. Such stories as A Day's Wait, A Clean and Well-Lighted Place and Hills Like White Elephants were heartbreaking glimpses into mundane injuries that leave ordinary people scarred and broken.
An infinitesimally small number of artists ever achieve such heights and even fewer in the first decade of adulthood. Many things contributed to this sensation that was the young Hemingway.
To begin with, similarly incidentally to many of the iconic rock stars of the 70s-80s - think of David Bowie, David Byrne and Madonna - Hemingway had an astute aptitude for co-opting tropes and techniques of avant garde and experimental artists. He learned important lessons about language and narrative from those experimenting outside the mainstream. Yet, like Bowie or Madonna, had a knack for understanding how to apply those insights while maintaining an appeal to a mass audience. Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, were among the experimental writers Hemingway learned from, but managed to capture in a way domesticated for popular tastes.
And capture it, he did. In a manner strikingly resembling the way that rock and roll captured the rebellion and idealism of the educated and materially privileged baby boomers, Hemingway's fiction captured the existential disquiet of the post-WWI lost generation.
Like, though, any artist who has such early meteoric success, replicating it can be a difficult thing to do. Though he had some modest "hits" along the way, it is not unfair to say he never quite reached the same heights literarily again after the early 30s. Probably only For Whom the Bell Tolls approached his early breakthrough works.
For all that, though, Hemingway never ceased to be a household name and a source of constant popular fascination. Further, not only was he aware of this aspect of his fame, but he seems to have taken no small effort in cultivating it. He nurtured relationships with influential gossip columnists and photographs of him hunting or fishing big game always had a way of finding their way into the glossy magazines of the period.
Rather far ahead of his time, he was the pitchman for a number of consumer goods, including a pen, airline and a beer. Additionally there was a regular supply of letters from Hemingway to literary and other publications in which he contributed to the continual building and shaping of his persona and mystique as man's man and anti-intellectual intellectual.
Many accused Hemingway by the middle of the century of having become a kind of parody of himself. Indeed, one can't help thinking of all the 60s and 70s rock and pop bands, grey and flabby, who continue to rake in the dough on the nostalgia circuit of casinos and community halls.
In Hemingway's case, however, one last triumph was still awaiting. Imagine those hanging-on senior citizen rock bands that, instead, of just endlessly playing the feel good greatest hits, actually had the brashness to insist on playing new material. And, to everyone's amazement, produced yet one more gold record.
When it appeared to all-the-world that Hemingway had nothing original or important left to say, the literary world was swept away with the 1952 publication of his heartbreaking novella, The Old Man and the Sea. Amazingly, he had done it again; once more Hemingway had become artistically relevant. No doubt largely a function of this last great hurrah, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, perhaps adding the final piece to the Hemingway legend.
That it was a story of an elderly man, with one last chance at greatness, who sees it slip away between his fingers, never quite really within his grasp, may remind us that his most successful works were those with a vaguely autobiographical flavor - and a sense of inexorable tragedy.
Like so many of the rock stars that followed the template he forged, in 1961, in an isolated home, Hemingway came to his demise, in a suicidal fog of depression and substance abuse. In the process not only did we lose one of the most important artists of the 20th century, but the one who invented the model of artistic celebrity that would mold the dreams of aspiring youth throughout the rest of the century.
And it still does.
Hemingway is well placed on our list of top 20 most famous American authors . He deserves his place for his literary accomplishments, but the significance of his literary achievement is transcended by his role as the model of artistic celebrity that shaped the 20th century.
Hemingway would still have qualified for registration at most youth hostels when his brooding and anguished novella of restless ennui, The Sun Also Rises, became an instant darling of the literary critics. Then, miraculously, only three years later, still soaking up the glow of critical acclaim, his novel, A Farewell to Arms, became a popular best seller. And this new best seller status was backed by a pair of short story collections, in the years just prior and subsequent to the novel that revealed Hemingway as nothing less than the re-inventor the short story form. Such stories as A Day's Wait, A Clean and Well-Lighted Place and Hills Like White Elephants were heartbreaking glimpses into mundane injuries that leave ordinary people scarred and broken.
An infinitesimally small number of artists ever achieve such heights and even fewer in the first decade of adulthood. Many things contributed to this sensation that was the young Hemingway.
To begin with, similarly incidentally to many of the iconic rock stars of the 70s-80s - think of David Bowie, David Byrne and Madonna - Hemingway had an astute aptitude for co-opting tropes and techniques of avant garde and experimental artists. He learned important lessons about language and narrative from those experimenting outside the mainstream. Yet, like Bowie or Madonna, had a knack for understanding how to apply those insights while maintaining an appeal to a mass audience. Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, were among the experimental writers Hemingway learned from, but managed to capture in a way domesticated for popular tastes.
And capture it, he did. In a manner strikingly resembling the way that rock and roll captured the rebellion and idealism of the educated and materially privileged baby boomers, Hemingway's fiction captured the existential disquiet of the post-WWI lost generation.
Like, though, any artist who has such early meteoric success, replicating it can be a difficult thing to do. Though he had some modest "hits" along the way, it is not unfair to say he never quite reached the same heights literarily again after the early 30s. Probably only For Whom the Bell Tolls approached his early breakthrough works.
For all that, though, Hemingway never ceased to be a household name and a source of constant popular fascination. Further, not only was he aware of this aspect of his fame, but he seems to have taken no small effort in cultivating it. He nurtured relationships with influential gossip columnists and photographs of him hunting or fishing big game always had a way of finding their way into the glossy magazines of the period.
Rather far ahead of his time, he was the pitchman for a number of consumer goods, including a pen, airline and a beer. Additionally there was a regular supply of letters from Hemingway to literary and other publications in which he contributed to the continual building and shaping of his persona and mystique as man's man and anti-intellectual intellectual.
Many accused Hemingway by the middle of the century of having become a kind of parody of himself. Indeed, one can't help thinking of all the 60s and 70s rock and pop bands, grey and flabby, who continue to rake in the dough on the nostalgia circuit of casinos and community halls.
In Hemingway's case, however, one last triumph was still awaiting. Imagine those hanging-on senior citizen rock bands that, instead, of just endlessly playing the feel good greatest hits, actually had the brashness to insist on playing new material. And, to everyone's amazement, produced yet one more gold record.
When it appeared to all-the-world that Hemingway had nothing original or important left to say, the literary world was swept away with the 1952 publication of his heartbreaking novella, The Old Man and the Sea. Amazingly, he had done it again; once more Hemingway had become artistically relevant. No doubt largely a function of this last great hurrah, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, perhaps adding the final piece to the Hemingway legend.
That it was a story of an elderly man, with one last chance at greatness, who sees it slip away between his fingers, never quite really within his grasp, may remind us that his most successful works were those with a vaguely autobiographical flavor - and a sense of inexorable tragedy.
Like so many of the rock stars that followed the template he forged, in 1961, in an isolated home, Hemingway came to his demise, in a suicidal fog of depression and substance abuse. In the process not only did we lose one of the most important artists of the 20th century, but the one who invented the model of artistic celebrity that would mold the dreams of aspiring youth throughout the rest of the century.
And it still does.
About the Author:
To stay in the know on all the news about U.S. writers, dead or alive, you need to follow Mickey Jhonny's work at the blog Famous American Authors . He also follows the hottest shows in sophisticated television: catch his insightful articles at the Don Draper Haircut blog.
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