I just got rid of HBO today actually (looking to read and write more this summer) and then realized that the new HBO movie about Hemingway and Gellhorn is actually on this coming Monday night at 8 PM. I guess I struck out there but did not miss the pitch with the new book, Hemingway’s ‘The Garden of Eden: Twenty-Five Years of Criticism, edited by two of the better known scholars, Suzanne Del Gizzo and Frederick Svoboda – it looks great and I just ordered it.
Sam Jordison from the Guardian brings us his well-thought out Hemingway reading list that I really enjoyed reading (which makes me want to try to create my own EH reading list – how about you?). In his recent article – here – Jordison mentions a few books I have not thought about reading and in turn would like to add to my Hemingway collection. He suggested reading Michael Reynold’s five part series (think I’m one short) as well The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, a few of F Scott Fitzgerald books and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier to name a few.
William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, carried on a nuanced and complex literary rivalry. At times, each voiced a shared professional respect; at other times, each thought himself the superior craftsman and spoke disparagingly of the other.
Their relationship will be discussed by Joseph Fruscione, author of the recently released “Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry,” at the Library of Congress at noon on Friday, March 16, in Dining Room A on the sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.
Sponsored by the Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Division and the Poetry and Literature Center, the lecture is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are needed. Book sales and a book signing will follow the program.
In his book, Fruscione reveals the rivalry and contentious relationship between Faulkner and Hemingway and the impact the intersection of their careers had on the evolution of American Modernism. While these writers may have only met once, their writing became a debating platform and they pushed each other to excel and innovate, according to Fruscione. The rivalry was manifest textually through their fiction, nonfiction, letters, Nobel Prize addresses and spoken remarks.
Fruscione is an adjunct professor of English at Georgetown University and an adjunct assistant professor of first-year writing at George Washington University.
The Humanities and Social Sciences Division provides reference service and collection development in the Main, Local History and Genealogy, and Microform reading rooms at the Library of Congress. It regularly sponsors programs in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
The Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress fosters and enhances the public’s appreciation of literature. The center administers the endowed poetry chair, (the U.S. Poet Laureate), and coordinates an annual literary season of poetry, fiction and drama readings, performances, lectures and symposia, sponsored by the Library’s Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund and the Huntington Fund. For more information, visit www.loc.gov/poetry/.
Author Leonard Kriegel, On Men and Manhood (1979) said the following about Hemingway:
“His life does not serve our needs today. In the current drift toward a unisex culture, Hemingway has been demoted to being one of the enemy. But in the future, after our gender battles have quieted down, we may again be able to put him to use. He may, after all, be able to help us approach one of the problems we are probably never going to get rid of – exactly what it is we mean by manhood.”
Source: Leonard Kreigel, On Men and Manhood (New York: Hawthorn, 1979).
Debra Moddelmog, Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (Cornell University Press, 1999).
I am looking forward to finishing the last few chapters of Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife. Following that my Holiday reading will continue with Denis Brian’s The True Gen (Grove Press, 1988, 356 pgs.), Gerry Brenner’s The Old Man and the Sea: Story of a Common Man (Twayne Publishers, 1991, 120 pgs.) and finally, James Nagel’s Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984, 246 pgs.). I have started reading Nagel’s work (he dedicated the book to Philip Young) and read a great chapter on Island in the Streams: A Son
Remembers, by Patrick Hemingway. Patrick talks about what he remembered about the story and what actually was true and false regarding the main character, artist Thomas Hudson and of course his boys. Patrick had two parts of the story that interested him the most. One was the catching of the fish and the other is the shark attack. We know that the book is based loosely on Hemingway’s life and Patrick shares his insight into those two parts of the story and more. This book offers contributions from 12 different Hemingway scholars, in addition to Nagel and Hemingway’s son Patrick.
