[E. Pluribus Unum]

I've never understood why English teachers choose Old Man and the Sea for the representative Hemingway work. I've always liked For Whom the Bell Tolls better, and while it is longer, it is less obscure.

I love talking about Hemingway. Ever since he got hung with the PC "misogynist" label, all his work seems to have been denigrated.

You're right, The Old Man and the Sea was completely different from all of his other works, written at the end of his life when his health was failing.

His entire writing ethic was based on _TRUTH_. The way you started a novel was to write a true sentence, and keep writing them until your novel was complete. His stories took place in the real world, amid real political and physical circumstances. Nothing made up, everything could really happen just the way he wrote it. Same with his dialog, and he was one of the best at dialog, as far as I am concerned.

The Old Man and the Sea, however, was not based on _TRUTH_, it was based on emotion. The constellations the old man sees while battling the fish and taking it home would not have been visible during the time of year the story takes place. All kinds of other things, too, but it's been a while since I read a critique. The point is, as you say, TOMATS is not representative of Hemingway's work.

It was still a nice story, but nothing like my favorite, "The Sun Also Rises."

Now that's a novel. They don't make'em like that anymore.

[wildcatf4f3]

Dialog---yes, I've always wondered why he never wrote a play.

[Rummyfan]

Tbe best of Hemingway IMHO, in order:

1. For Whom the Bell Tolls
2. A Farewell to Arms
3. The Sun Also Rises

I enjoyed his short story collections too.

[sharktrager]

Try True at First Light. It was published just a few years ago and I truly enjoyed it. His son went through the unfinished manuscript and got it ready for publication.

The setting is much smaller than his earlier works, so it is more personal (and even more autobiographical) than his better known works. But the main character (essentially Hemingway himself) is a natural extension of his early work. More reflective of the natural progression of those protagonists much later in life. (Assuming they had either become wealthy or maintained the wealth described in the early works)

Plus, it is about big game hunting which has to piss the hell out of anyone on the left.