Underrated/overrated 20th century lit? Hemingway gets my vote for overrated; he’s treated like a god and I find most of his work fairly puerile. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with its boys’ adventure misogyny is a particular low point, but the manly men doing manly things with fish narrative also seems like Jack London without the hyperbolic preposterousness which makes London fun.
Underrated I’d say James Baldwin. His essays are maybe the best essays in the English language, but he’s mostly seen as a specialist interest, as far as I can tell. I wish folks would read him in high school rather than the Great Gatsby.
So what do you folks think? What 20th century writers are underrated or overrated?
What about John Updike, or Jack Kerouac, or Paul Auster, or Richard Brautigan, or John Irving, or Charles Bukowski, oh, so many white men… As for James Baldwin, he is amazing, but you don’t like his novels that much, do you?
I need to try the novels again, yeah. It’s the essays that really send me.
I think all those folks are overrated. Except for Richard Brautigan, who I don’t think I’ve ever read, so can’t really weigh in.
Yes on Hemingway. Although part of the cult of high school lit always makes me question myself, and say, “Well, I just haven’t read him closely enough, or at the right time! I just haven’t been manly enough to get him!”
He’s not horrible, I don’t think. But so, so pretentious. That prose style is one long humble brag.
Wait, Hemingway is humble? Are we talking about the same Hemingway? Perhaps you’re referring to Muriel Hemingway, who appeared opposite Kurt Russell in “The Mean Season?”
To Have and Have Not is great.
The Great Gatsby is overrated.
For underrated, I’d say John Barth is a good contender.
Isn’t Baldwin considered an all time great essayist? I googled “greatest essayist” and his was the first name in the first article. He is a wonderful writer, of course. Perhaps great essayists are undervalued.
Yeah, there are some genre problems. Like Philip K. Dick might be underrated as a fiction writer, but not as a science fiction writer.
Huh; maybe Baldwin is more respected than I’d thought. That would make me happy.
On the “adequately rated” side of things, Baldwin was the first 20th-century essayist collected in the Library of America series — and still one of the first essayists overall (after Emerson, James, and maybe Twain. Whether that gets him into high schools is another matter.
But regarding Hemingway, I like very little that he did after “The Sun Also Rises” “In Our Time.” But those two works — especially IOT — are amazing and merit him his spot in the sun (cp. Fitzgerald and Gatsby).
For me, overrated: Kerouac and Ginsberg, by a mile.
Underrated: I’d say Frost (widely beloved, but seen as a squishy feelgood poet), Annie Dillard, Laura Ingalls Wilder… Is Gertrude Stein underrated? (I’m guessing that those who tend to “rate” her, love her)
Wait, I think I’m focusing on Americans. I’m also influenced too much my what High School curricula do to “great authors” (see “Old Man and the Sea” or “My Antonia”).
I’ve got really mixed feelings about Annie Dillard. I loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek…but suspect that I would not enjoy it if I revisited it.
I’d agree with Kerouac and Ginsberg. Sort of goes along with the overrating of Dylan. The Beats in general, bleah.
I can sort of see why you might put Baldwin on an underrated list, given how his work has been canonized as only speaking to/for African Americans. But his audience and his own experience encompassed so many social and existential views that you would think his essays and his fiction would be essential to any modern American lit class. (I definitely think he should be taught more than Hemingway.) I am hoping that the celebrations surrounding the 90th anniversary of his birthday will get a lot of attention… http://www.newyorklivearts.org/liveideas2014/
As much as I really do enjoy Faulkner, he would go on my overrated list.
When I was in high school my dad got me copies of Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and The Evidence of Things Not Seen, and I felt about them the same way I did the first time I heard the Velvet Underground or saw a Jack Smith film (or read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which I still adore). Suddenly, the world looked and sounded and felt very, very different. I’ve carried that copy of Notes with me like a talisman for almost thirty years.
But underrated…that’s an interesting question. I’d say Anna Kavan, especially her short story collection Asylum Piece and her final novel Ice. I’m also a big fan of a lot of somewhat neglected late 19th/early 20th century realists (or “local color” writers), like Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett. Charles W. Chesnutt’s short stories are stunning. Lately I’ve also been enjoying John Fante and William Saroyan. I guess I’m a fan of American regionalist writers! It probably all started with Washington Irving for me…
I think Jewett’s pretty canonical now, isn’t she? Or at least that was my impression….
I’m going to first assume that “rated” means the ratings of the literati.
Practically every famous “literary author” taught in “American literature” classes is overrated, and even where the author is good, the book chosen is generally overrated. (The big exceptions to this rule are the 19th century folks, Mark Twain and anyone from before.)
I think this is because the American Literature genre is artificial. It was created as some sort of weird competitive thing because there were already English Literature classes and American professors thought they should have their own Great Authors.
But rather than looking at what authors were really popular and had lasted over time, the American lit professors were severely pretentious about it and tried to pick recent stuff. Hence crap like Faulkner and Hemingway and Kerouac and Ginsburg and so on.
The concept of “American literature” was created after Twain — Twain is credited as being the first to call for a distinctive “American” literature — so stuff from Twain and before was evaluated reasonably fairly. But after the “American literature” concept was created by the American lit professors, practically everything added to the “American” canon after that was extremely pretentious, and I think it’s really down to the choices being made by highly pretentious people.
The English lit people were more laissez-faire about who got “canonized”, partly because they had a longer history to work with — so they didn’t “canonize” anyone who was still publishing and they were happy to “canonize” stuff which was considered “low grade popular trash” back when it was published, such as Dickens and Shakespeare. Which makes for a better reading list, because that low-grade popular trash is often really good.
I think Faulkner is extremely overrated. But I’m told by those who grew up in the 60s and earlier in the disturbing racist, sexist, awful environment of Mississippi that Faulker reads much, much better in the Deep South — he speaks to them.
To those of us in the North, first of all, his novels are written in a nearly impenetrable code. Second, once I deciphered it, the immediate reaction I had was “EEEEWWWWWW!” e describes a disgusting society filled almost entirely with hateful people who I would be happy to see euthanized. If anything, reading Faulkner made me much more bigoted against the Deep South. Is that really a good thing? I don’t think so.
Anyway, basically anything which was popular literature in the US is underrated. Anything.
All great children’s literature is underrated (even in Britain) because the entire genre is excluded by the pretentiousness filter.
So, _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ is underrated by theliterati, and so are the entire works of E. Nesbit (who created the whole damn genre as we know it, as Alison Lurie has explained), so is _Tom Sawyer_ (even though it’s by Mark Twain!), and yes, so is Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The entire genre of science fiction is also underrated; entire books have been written about this.
The entire genre of humor is also underrated.
The genre of adaptations is underrated, for the same reasons of pretentiousness.
As a result, one of the most underrated books of the last 50 years is _The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy_, which manages to be in three disfavored genres simultaneously (SF, humor, and adaptation). Thankfully, because it’s a worldwide bestseller and has been in continuous publication for something like 40 years, it doesn’t much matter that it’s underrated — you’ve probably read it. (If you haven’t, drop everything you’re currently doing for entertainment, and go get a copy and read it. Now.) Douglas Adams is one of the true greats of writing, and the fact that he now has multiple biographies indicates that *some people* are rating him highly.
So perhaps it’s inappropriate to use “rated by the literati” as the meaning of “rated”. Rated by whom? When?
Worth noting: probably because of being humor, and perhaps because of being an adaptation, _Hitchhikers_ didn’t manage to get nominated for any of the science fiction awards when it came out. So even within the science fiction genre, it’s easy for a truly great work to be underrated.
I generally think works which were actually wildly popular at the time, but scorned by the award-givers and the literati, have very good chances of being underrated.
Personally I love _The Great Gatsby_ but I’ve discovered it’s quite incomprehensible to most people these days. It’s very much a period piece, and you have to *explain* the social environment of the 1920s — particularly the mass drunkenness — to the reader before the reader can make sense of it. (My grandmother grew up in the ’20s so I already understood it from her stories.) Believe it or not, people are, on average, a hell of a lot more sober now than they were then.
This is a similar problem to that of reading Shakespeare (vocabulary, technology, geography, and social details) or Jane Austen or Charles Dickens (legal details, technology, social details, money) or the Odyssey (ancient hospitality rules and other social details). _Gatsby_ may be 20th century, but it’s from another world which most of us do not recognize, and it’s addressed to the people who lived in that world, not to us.
I love Faulkner. And I kind of think the Hitchiker’s Guide is overrated (it’s been a long time since I read it though.)
I don’t really get the argument that Jane Austen is alien. People love Jane Austen. She’s constantly cited in romance novels, which are read by tons of people; there are movies and films and tv shows based on her work. It’s true that that time isn’t this time, but a big part of this time is an appreciation of Jane Austen.
For underrated I’d say James M. Cain. Of the big three Depression-Era U. S. pulp-crime novelists, he’s generally rated below Hammett and Chandler. I find him a lot more interesting, though, largely because his male characters don’t embody adolescent masculine ideals. They’re invariably creeps and losers. His women characters are easily the most shaded of the three writers And when he jettisons the crime material, as he did in Mildred Pierce, he handles social realist fiction about as well as anyone ever has.
For most overrated, I’d say J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most insufferable novels ever written. Is anything more tiresome than the angst of an upper-class, alienated teenager?
With Baldwin, I think you can make the argument that he deserves higher stature than he has, but I’d say he’s produced canonical work. Go Tell It on the Mountain shows up on all the most touted lists of the best 20th-century English-language novels. (When I read it for an African-American lit class in grad school, it was easily the most popular of the assigned works among the students.) The short story “Sonny’s Blues” is heavily anthologized and frequently assigned to high-school students and college undergraduates. And then there are the essays, which I think are considered among the best of the 20th century.
Cain’s an interesting choice. I can’t remember if I’ve read anything by him or not. I’d definitely agree with Salinger being overrated and insufferable.
Vote for John Nichols, author of Milagro Beanfield War, as underrated.
Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice are my go-to books with Cain.
Okay, I did read the Postman Always Rings Twice. I liked that.
“I don’t really get the argument that Jane Austen is alien.”
For some reason which I don’t fully understand, nearly EVERYONE is taught LARGE AMOUNTS abeout Victorian-era England. Talk to someone who hasn’t imbibed vast quantities of Victorian or cod-Victorian material and see if they can understand _Sense and Sensibility_, whose plot is based around an estate entailment.
It’s actually Regency, not Victorian. And people are taught a ton about Shakespeare’s time too. It’s not a coincidence.
No book exists out of context. You have to learn to read English to understand works in English, just for starters. But the fact that you need background knowledge doesn’t mean that the book isn’t great, or that there’s something wrong with it. Folks who don’t know the tropes of sci-fi aren’t going to be able to make heads or tails of Hitchhiker’s Guide. So what? Unless your standard for excellence is some sort of universal accessibility (and good luck with that) I don’t really see why it’s relevant…?
“And I kind of think the Hitchiker’s Guide is overrated”
Reread it. It was only a few years back that I realized what the major theme of Douglas Adams’s work is, and it’s a very important one.
The role of chance in the universe.
The theme gets hammered on more and more heavily in each subsquent book.
This is a very significant counterweight to the entire worldview which has been popular for a very long time — the view of an orderly universe with reliable cause and effect. Whether it was the religious view of “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world”, the view of Great People Making History, the view of the Great Clockmaker inexorably driving the world on a predictable course, the standard worldview has been one of a structured world with a very low role for random chance.
Having studied a lot of science, Douglas Adams knew that that was wrong. He also knew that people are psychologically predisposed to see patterns and structure where there is only chance — this is a known psychological bias.
The theme of the role of chance in the universe runs through these books like a huge river.
They’re also very, very funny, at least if you’re smart. There are often two complex philosophical jokes per *sentence*, on a number of other topics as well as chance. It’s a bit like _Alice in Wonderland_ that way.
I suppose if you’re the sort of reader who doesn’t read for ideas, you won’t appreciate it. At least 80% of the gags are digging into very deep philosophical and scientific territory (though there are a few actual flubs which are just dumb.)
“Unless your standard for excellence is some sort of universal accessibility (and good luck with that) I don’t really see why it’s relevant…?”
It was relevant solely to the fact that most people don’t appreciate _The Great Gatsby_ when they read it because they are NOT taught the context and do NOT know the context. And it’s not actually one you can fully pick up from the book. For some reason, because it’s as recent as the 1920s, people try to read it *without* providing history notes, whereas most Jane Austen editions *do* have such notes.
Did you actually read what I wrote? I thought I made it clear that I was mentioning this in the context of _The Great Gatsby_.
I enjoy the hatred for these classics, but for overrated, I’d really go with Michael Chabon. As the Wikipedia page says, “one of the most celebrated writers of his generation”, despite his prose being so bad that it’s painful to read. Kavalier & Clay reads like one long Salon article, and that one won the Pulitzer.
The Pulitzer for fiction seems to be a pretty good gauge for what’s currently overrated. Lots of middle-brow dreck on the list.
For underrated, I thought Amy Hempel would be a good choice, but looking around the web it looks like she’s rated pretty high. I’ll jump to the 21st Century, then, and go for Miranda July.
Nathanael: Ah, okay. I misunderstood. Fair enough.
I’d like to second whomever mentioned Barth as under-rated, at least in the popular eye (also Stanley Elkin) … but the real contender for unknown talent is Stanley Crawford.
Hemingway is rubbish, ditto the Great Gatsby. Novels for people who have to have their thinking done for them in bite-sized clichés. Nothing’s changed, really.
I don’t know whether he’s overrated, but I recently picked up (for free) a collection of Tom Wolfe’s essays, and man, I hate that smug little prick. More specifically, I hate his stupid political opinions, his stupid literary opinions, his stupid sense of self-worth, and his stupid little white suit. I guess his style has been influential, though–his snotty article about The New Yorker and William Shawn, published in the 60s, reads exactly like a typical Spy Magazine article from the 80s.
Speaking of essayists, Hunter Thompson’s political essays were very good, esp. in the 70s. The political essay is a dead art-form now but HT and Gore Vidal used to write very clean, crisp prose work with genuine analytical sophistication. American journalism schools have a lot to answer for.
Overrated: Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Will Faulkner, John Updike, Salinger, and James Joyce (although I am conflicted on this last because ,unlike the others, Joyce was trying for something original and arrived at confusing and dull. He was inventive, but not great).
Underrated: Jim Dodge, Gertrude Stein, Ursula le Guin, Italo Calvino, and Terry Pratchett (who needs to be recognized as an author for all ages).
Just about right although I wish they were rated higher so more would read them: James Thurber, John Steinbeck, C.S. Forester, Zane Grey, Philip K. Dick.
Having given this some thought i’ve realised it is much harder to think of an overrated novelist than an overrated novel. Catcher In The Rye is horribly overrated but Franny & Zooey was wonderful, as are some of Salinger’s shorts. I find the influence On The Road has had baffling, but The Town and the City and Visions of Gerard were both good. I’ll say Henry Miller is overrated but he did tell some funny stories and i like his prose style.
For Underrated I propose Mordecai Richler. Barney’s Version in particular was very funny and deeply moving. I consider setting a legitimate page-turner in the mind of a depressed elderly man no small accomplishment. Edith Wharton is widely beloved but could stand to be more beloved.
Thinking about it again, I think romance novelists are pretty wholesale underrated. Laura Kinsale is a really interesting writer (more so than Terry Pratchett for sure), and has sold a ton of books, but she’s romance, so nobody really thinks about her.
Noah, do you think some Romance novels will recieve literary acclaim in the foreseeable future the way some science fiction eventually did and what do you think will be the distinguishing features of those novels/novelists. Also, thank you so much for the work you put into this site and even though it goes without saying you don’t have to do more free work by answering my question.
Eh, you’re writing here for free too, right?
I have trouble seeing romance getting mainstream credibility anytime soon. There is some academic movement towards greater interest/appreciation of romance as worthy of study, but publicly and on mainstream sites it’s pretty much anathema as far as I can tell.
I mean, it’s possible. If it can happen with comics it can happen with anything…but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Well, there’s “literary acclaim” and there’s “mainstream credibility,” and I’m not sure that we want to think of those as the same thing.
Poet Ronald Johnson got literary acclaim very early in his career, and when Louis Zukofsky died, Guy Davenport dubbed Johnson “the best living poet in America.” That would have been roughly 35 years before Johnson got any notice in a “mainstream” publication (thank you, Stephen Burt and The New Yorker), and I doubt that RJ will be mainstream any time soon.
I can think of a number of romance novelists who deserve “literary acclaim,” if by that we mean “acclaim that’s framed in the terms that literary critics like to use”: artistry, subtlety, complexity, interest. Kinsale is one, and I’ve tried to give her that sort of attention in my essay on her in the New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction anthology; I have another essay that does the same thing with Susan Elizabeth Phillips in a forthcoming book, and there are a bunch of essays on Jennifer Crusie that do the same thing over at the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. There are many, many more who deserve such attention–far more than there are scholars and critics to give it.
That said, I don’t think that romance will get “mainstream credibility” soon. A lot of people are deeply invested in scorning it, as a genre, and not many authors in the genre seem to worry all that much about claiming “literary” status, whatever the excellence and artistry of their work. This makes romance a bit different from mystery / detective fiction and SF / fantasy; where that difference comes from, and what it means, I’ll have to think about more.
Thanks Eric!
There are definite concrete disadvantages to a lack of literary credibility. The big one that I’ve noticed recently is that books don’t stay in print. There’s no procedure for declaring books canonical, or worthwhile beyond their immediate sell date, which means that backcatalogs are a mess.
@ Eric –
_’That said, I don’t think that romance will get “mainstream credibility” soon. A lot of people are deeply invested in scorning it, as a genre, and not many authors in the genre seem to worry all that much about claiming “literary” status, whatever the excellence and artistry of their work. This makes romance a bit different from mystery / detective fiction and SF / fantasy; where that difference comes from, and what it means, I’ll have to think about more.’_
Possibly a consequence of mystery/detective/sci fi/fantasy authors and audience skewing male and romance authors and audience skewing female?
What Kinsale books due her fans recommend reading? Romance as the most under-rated genre appeals to me. Certainly both scifi and mystery/suspense get taken more seriously. Even fantasy.
I’ve only read For My Lady’s Heart, which was very good. It has a sequel, which I haven’t read yet. So…that would be a place to start.
Lars, I disagree on Chabon’s prose. I read Kavalier & Clay and highlighted lines where I thought he communicated exceptionally well.
While I’m being mildly contrarian, I really enjoyed Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, despite a teacher making me read it. I’ve only read one or two of his other short stories beyond that, but I met one true Hemingway fan who thought Old Man and the Sea was lame — maybe trying too hard.
James Salter’s The Hunters was the most impressive literary novel I’ve read in a long time — not exactly fun, but communicative and evocative.
I’m a big fan of Barnes & Noble’s classic editions for their ability to unobtrusively provide context. I read their edition of Stoker’s Dracula a few years ago, and the footnotes significantly enhanced my understanding of the book and what Stoker was trying to do. They also made it more enjoyable.
I realize that Barnes and Noble Classics editions are extremely cheap, but I don’t trust them. When I started reading their edition of Frankenstein, I noticed that it was filled with unnecessary commas that created subject-less clauses (i.e., “I went outside, and saw that it was a nice day”). So I compared their edition to a couple of others, and it seems like those unnecessary commas came some editor at Barnes and Noble, rather than from Mary Shelley. Now I only get Penguin Classics, which seem to have better introductions and footnotes anyway.
I must say that Hemingway’s books have not aged well, to say the least. They are filled with disappointing endings, pointless death scenes and dialogue, and various other remarkably amateurish things that writers often advise other writers to never, ever do. I honestly have to wonder if an editor ever even saw them. I know that it might seem like sacrilege to criticize the great Writing God Hemingway as being rather amateurish, but I suspect his reputation as a “Writing God” was formed in another time, under another set of values, which have long since gone away. I have seen many books far better-written than Hemingway’s from a dramatic point of view, and even just in terms of good writing.
My reaction to Hemingway is very like that of Bradley Cooper, in the movie “Silver Linings Playbook.” Cooper reads to the end of Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell To Arms, and freaks out. The reason? (Spoilers!) The wife of the main character in A Farewell To Arms just DIES for no apparent reason, leaving her man bereft and alone, and very very sad – and after an entire book of the man attempting to find his woman, overcoming enormous obstacles, until (seemingly) finally achieving victory and happiness! Pointless, cliched, and amateurish.
I have seen writers such as Stephen King – together with so many different writing instructors – advise other writers to never, ever have the main character fail entirely to achieve his/her goals by the end of a long novel. Readers do not stick with a main character through a 200 or 300 page book (or longer), just to see him/her struggle, struggle, struggle, and then suddenly fail to triumph at the end. It’s the equivalent of seeing a hero struggle brilliantly against the bad guys for a long, involved epic, only to have the hero fail completely at the very last moment, and the bad guys win. Yech. What an ugly ending. Whatever Hemingway’s ultimate point in writing such an ending, dramatically, it doesn’t work. Readers tend to feel cheated by having the main character fail completely; they feel frustrated and let down, as does Cooper in the movie – he throws the book out a window – and most of Hemingway’s books seem to have similarly amateurish and unsatisfying endings in them.
In Hemingway’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” (more spoilers!) the main character, Jordan, fails to escape from an ambush scene during World War Two, and, wounded, spends the last pages of the book gasping out his final breaths, waiting for the enemy to arrive and kill him. No point, no victory, no triumph – just pointless death. And after a whole book of difficult, heroic struggle, too. This is fantastically unsatisfying, and actually made me quite angry as a reader at Hemingway for wasting my time and for cheating me. Having a main character die at the end of a long novel is another huge literary no-no, and it also tends to make readers feel cheated and frustrated. Unless the death is done very, very well, as is Dumbledore’s death in Harry Potter, writers should not kill main characters at a novel’s end – and Jordan’s death is not anywhere NEAR as satisfying and well-done as Dumbledore’s.
And in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the main character, Jake, spends a great deal of the book pursuing a girl named Brett, who in the end just decides arbitrarily to have a relationship with Mike, another rival character – and Jake and Brett spend the final pages of the book in a taxi, discussing “what might have been.” Another disgusting, pointless ending, where the difficulties are not overcome, and it all just ends because it ends. This no doubt prompted one reviewer at the time to say of the book that it “begins nowhere and ends in nothing.” I must say I heartily agree.
Why did Hemingway frequently write endings that other writers tend to describe as amateurish and cliched? My suspicion is that he was trying to be all “literary” and “serious.” It’s almost as though he’s saying, “Look at how most of my main characters fail in the end! I must indeed be a very Serious Writer, who takes Literature VERY Seriously, and who is trying to make a very Profound STATEMENT. Life and Death, wow! Meaning and meaninglessness, ooh!”
I personally think it’s just plain bad writing. But hey.
Hemingway’s books also tend to be remarkably boring and dull, no doubt arising from his amateurish grasp of drama, as demonstrated by his hackneyed bad endings. He does little to satisfy the reader in most of his books, in their middles OR at their ends, preferring to remain unspokenly Profound, and (as I said earlier) it doesn’t work. Writers can be as profound as they want, but if they don’t have a dramatically interesting story to tell, it really doesn’t matter. As Stephen King says, most readers just want a good story, something to get lost in – and I think most people today find it very, very difficult to get lost in Hemingway’s writing. I don’t see any major movies being made of his books today, as there are (for example) for J.R.R. Tolkien – whom I consider to be a vastly superior writer to Hemingway. The reason seems to be that Hemingway’s books are, for the most part, not very interesting or dramatic, and are often awkwardly written and amateurish in their endings. At least Frodo Baggins destroys the Ring in The Lord Of The Rings; most of Hemingway’s characters just seem to die or fail at life (or both). I really don’t see blockbuster material here, or even very good writing.
As for Hemingway’s “short” sentences, I have to say that most of them are not really all that short. H. G. Wells, for example, in his masterpiece “The Time Machine,” uses much, much shorter sentences than Hemingway tends to – and “The Time Machine” was published in 1895, far earlier than Hemingway, and is a much more interesting and well-written read than anything Hemingway ever wrote.
Sometime a writer’s work just ages badly – and I think it’s time for a major re-evaluation of Hemingway’s books in general. The best-selling author during Hemingway’s time was not Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Salinger – it was Edgar Rice Burroughs, the inventor of Tarzan, which really says something, I think – Hemingway never created any characters as deep, memorable or unique as Tarzan; every school-child has heard of Tarzan. And reading Burrough’s actual books, it is very clear that Tarzan himself is an absolutely remarkable character; he doesn’t just stay in the jungle like in the movies; he becomes an English Lord, and a soldier, and distinguished himself by fighting in World War Two. Way better than Hemingway’s war stories. Even Hemingway’s CHARACTERS aren’t all that terribly great or compelling, and I think it’s about time he shouldered some criticism for that too.
In summary, I find Hemingway to be a rank amateur writer, about whom I cannot understand why various “literary” people frequently make so much fuss – maybe they just like dull, uninteresting stories with cliched endings. I think much of his reputation as a “Writing God” is thoroughly undeserved, and should in fact be revoked. He doesn’t challenge me intellectually or dramatically; his badly-written stories mostly just frustrate me and annoy me, as they did Bradley Cooper – and as I think they do most people with any real experience with more expertly-written stories. Now that I’ve actually READ most of Hemingway’s books – most recently The Old Man And The Sea – I really don’t see what all the fuss is about. Why is Hemingway so famous? I think it’s just an accident, really. I think he just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and for no other reason. Editors frequently say that there are absolutely no rules in the publishing business, about why one writer becomes famous, and another does not. If it happens, then it happens. I think Hemingway is just an overall bad writer who got very, very lucky – and I think he has been unfairly held up for years before the rest of us as what a writer SHOULD be, despite his rather boring stories, unmemorable characters, and amateurish endings.
In the words of Bradley Cooper, “No, no, I’m not going to apologize to you; ERNEST HEMINGWAY needs to apologize, because THAT’S who’s at fault here. That’s who’s to blame.”