He was a great writer. I have read and re-read his books and they are always rewarding. Faulkner? Not so much. Faulkner’s characters never *do* much, they are enmeshed in their imposed Freudian snares and one becomes impatient with them.
Hemingway was the last of the literary writers whose characters acted, did stuff, made things happen.
Did Hemingway consider himself a "literary" writer?
>>He was a great writer. I have read and re-read his books and they are always rewarding. Faulkner? Not so much. Faulkner’s characters never *do* much, they are enmeshed in their imposed Freudian snares and one becomes impatient with them.
Well, many people have difficulty with understanding Faulkner, so that is understandable. I would say that Hemingway was less important of an author, simply because Faulkner outwrote by about 4 times the amount of novels, created his own allegorical county, and experimented with narrative in a way that Hemingway never even attempted.
Hemingway’s one grace is that there is so much meaning hidden in his stories, but the narration really never changes much. If you look at a story like “Sound and the Fury” or “As I Lay Dying,” the story is cut into pieces that the reader has to assemble.
Then again, in “Sun Also Rises” the characters really don’t do anything except circle Brett Ashley, drink, and attack one another - Faulkner’s characters do way more than that.