"Hemingway" in the Twenty-First Century

a Reconsideration

Ernest Hemingway’s final appearance on display in my office

After nearly a lifetime of reading Ernest Hemingway and near half that time teaching him, I was prompted by my reaction to the 2021 Ken Burns-Lynn Novick Hemingway documentary on PBS to write “‘Hemingway’ in the Twenty-First Century,” which was published in the Winter 2022 issue of The Hong Kong Review. These last couple of weeks of reshares on Homo Vitruvius inspired me to put the essay before a new readership.

The photo you see above — not the one I took of the photo of Hemingway, placed on a bookshelf for that purpose, but the photo of Hemingway itself — hung on the walls of every home office I worked in, in cities around the U.S., for about 35-40 years. It was generously given to me (apparently after my having accumulated the perfectly numbered recurrent ejaculations of envy) by a fellow young writer, a few doors down on West 105th Street, who had kept it on the wall of his very cool Upper West Side Manhattan loft apartment…