The Woke Bell Tolls for Ernest Hemingway

PJ Media ^ | 29 June 2023 | Robert Spencer

[ought-six]

Some school districts have banned the works of — in my opinion — the greatest American writer ever: Mark Twain.

More’s the pity; because Twain’s stuff is extraordinary, and WAY ahead of his time. The guy was simply brilliant.

[Rummyfan]

TCM is my usual channel for entertainment.

TCM and sports for me. That's it. Mind you baseball has been ridiculous this month with all the pride promotion.

[mewzilla]

Bertelsmann owns PRH.

Nuff said.

[Rummyfan]

But Cooper was simply too much for 9th graders.

I found Cooper much more enjoyable and easily digestible than Hawthorne.

[ought-six]

I liked Hemingway’s stuff; though I don’t think he is among the top tier of American writers. But he is certainly readable.

The best American writer ever was Mark Twain; no one else even comes close (IMHO). His social commentaries were brilliant. But then, everything he wrote was a social commentary.

[ought-six]

I always like Silas Marner. There was a movie many years ago with Steve Martin that was based on Silas Marner, but with a late 20th century bent. I think it was called “A Simple Twist of Fate.”

[gundog]

https://memes.yarn.co/yarn-clip/af4eef59-b57d-4329-bff3-9788e07a7d96

[ought-six]

“I found Cooper much more enjoyable and easily digestible than Hawthorne.”

You should read Mark Twain’s essays on Cooper. They are hilarious!

[Rummyfan]

LOL! One of my favorite Seinfeld episodes. Lawrence Tierney was supposed to come back as Elaine's father in a recurring role. But the cast members were too afraid of him!

[Seruzawa]

His chapters in Roughing It on Salt Lake City and the Mormons are total classics.

[gundog]

Chris Penn and others do some good material on him in the “Reservoir Dogs” DVD extras.

[gundog]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T2ohXTtJP7A

[Verginius Rufus]

You'd think they would give Hemingway a pass for being a fan of Fidel Castro.

The only one of his novels I read all the way through was The Old Man and the Sea. I tried one or two of the others but couldn't get into them.

[HartleyMBaldwin]

I never did read any Cooper, because I read Twain’s essays first. Maybe I will someday, though.

[AnAmericanMother]

I hope it will cheer you up to read Mark Twain's masterful takedown of Cooper . . .

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

[AnAmericanMother]

Great minds travel the same channels!

[firebrand]

His prose was the literary partner of modern art: stripped down and beautiful. People ridiculed it as sounding like a staccato version of English prose, or oversimplified to the extreme. But that was the point. It was the verbal equivalent of Brancusi.

We can’t judge books on their social attitude and values, because those have changed enormously in the past decades, and mostly for the better. It takes a different kind of genius to overcome the present opinion of the crowd.

I just tried reading The Portrait of Dorian Gray and couldn’t get past the anti-Semitism, which some have tried to defend on literary grounds but there is no defending it. Yet every sentence was a masterpiece. Same kind of thing.

[AnAmericanMother]

“We had to talk on our fingers entirely til the children got bored with the pennywhistles . . . “

[Noumenon]

Get hard copies into your library while you can.

[Retain Mike]

Because I was trained as a Boat Group Officer, my favorite Hemmingway piece is his relation of what it was like in a wave of LCVP’s off Omaha beach on June 6, 1944. It is called Voyage to Victory, but I couldn’t find the link again that has the complete text. I doubt there is a better piece describing how to get a wave of assault boats to a beach.