10 - The Undisputed Champ Once More (2011–2014)

Summary

THE STATUS OF HEMINGWAY's REPUTATION in the broad academic community fifty years after his death was succinctly described by Robert Lamb (2010) in the introduction to Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story. Despite the proliferation of scholarship on Hemingway, “there remains a strong antipathy among academic critics toward him and his work, sometimes resulting in downright dismissal, especially among generalists and non-twentieth-century scholars” (1–2). Lamb countered Hemingway's detractors with a litany of praise he assembled from twentieth-century authors worldwide who openly acknowledged their admiration of Hemingway's work and their debt to him as an influence on their own fiction and nonfiction. These tributes, Lamb said, are convincing proof that Hemingway is “a towering figure whose art matters enormously” (6).

Anniversary Tributes

The fiftieth anniversary of Hemingway's death served as the occasion for the publication of several retrospectives—some in what might be considered unusual places. USA Today ran an article enumerating reasons Hemingway had “turned into a cottage industry since his death” (Wilson 2011). Jeffrey Meyers (2011) wrote a brief tribute for the online edition of the Wall Street Journal, noting the highlights of Hemingway's life in the spotlight and offering the opinion that his best works stand with those of Fitzgerald and Faulkner as “the literary gold standard for the 20th century.” Los Angeles Times culture critic Reed Johnson's (2011) assessment of Hemingway's legacy stressed his larger-than-life presence fifty years after his death and his continuing influence on popular culture and literature. Johnson ended his article with a comment by Junot Diaz, author of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: “[Hemingway] had an enormous influence on male writing in America, and his echoes, I suspect, are to be found almost everywhere.” On the other side of the Atlantic, in a long piece for Britain's Independent, John Walsh (2011) explored the reasons for Hemingway's suicide, finding them in Hemingway's inability to “sustain[] the myth of Hemingway the Man's Man.” Also interested in the cause for Hemingway's decision to take his own life, the Observer's Peter Beaumont (2011) suggested that constant hounding by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover played a more significant role than previously acknowledged.