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Dating Hemingway's Early Style/Parsing Gertrude Stein's Modernism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Dennis Ryan
Dennis Ryan
Affiliation:
Denis Ryan is Instructor of Language Arts and Humanities at Pasco Hernando Community College, 10230 Ridge Road, New Post Richey, FL 34654–5199, U.S.A.
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Extract

In the relatively short history of Hemingway studies, a significant controversy has erupted as to how early and to what degree Gertrude Stein influenced Ernest Hemingway's early style. The earlier commentators (whose works date roughly from 1952 to 1973) agree that Gertrude Stein significantly influenced Hemingway's early style from 1921 to 1924. For instance, Philip Young writes that “similarities between his prose and hers suggest indeed that he learned a lot. What she had tried to do in the days when Hemingway was a boy was remarkably like what the young man was going one day to try to do, too.” Charles Fenton concurs, writing that Hemingway responded to Stein's method “between 1922 and 1924, the period of Miss Stein's greatest personal importance to him.” Carlos Baker reports that Stein provided sound advice and that “nearly any 23-year-old author could profit by it,” which is “what Hemingway did whenever he sat down at the typewriter.” Finally, Sheldon Grebstein concludes that “Hemingway brought [Stein's] experiments to fruition and made it [her style] a major resource of his style.”

Type
Notes and Comment
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , August 1995 , pp. 229 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Although literary critics have written about Hemingway's work since Wilson, Edmund reviewed Three Stories & Ten Poems and In Our Time in 1924Google Scholar, Hemingway studies date from 1952, the year Philip Young's Ernest Hemingway and Carlos Baker's Hemingway: The Writer as Artist appeared.

2 Young, Philip, Ernest Hemingway (New York: Rinehart, 1952), 152Google Scholar.

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6 Young, 153.

7 Fenton, 152.

8 Reynolds, Michael, Hemingway: The Paris Years (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 14Google Scholar; Fenton, 152.

9 See Reynolds, 110.

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11 Perloff, Marjorie, “The Extra: ‘Ninety Percent Rotarian’: Gertrude Stein's Heming-way,” American Literature, 62 (12 1990), 671Google Scholar.

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13 Ibid., 672.

14 Ibid., 683.

15 One month after Perloff, 's essay was published in American Literature (12 1990)Google Scholar. The Chronicle of Higher Education (16 Jan. 1991) published a short in its “Research Notes” that begins as follows: “In a comparison of short stories by Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, a scholar at Stanford University says that Stein's language is more subtle, complex and open to interpretation than Hemingway's.” This sentence was later quoted in The Hemingway Newsletter (January 1992), the semiannual publication of The Hemingway Society. The author of The Hemingway Newsletter note concludes that Perloff meant to demonstrate the superiority of Stein's story to Hemingway's (8).

16 Young, Philip, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), 177–79Google Scholar; Fenton, 149–153; Grebstein, 79–80.

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32 Hemingway, Ernest, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), 15Google Scholar. Hemingway had met Stein in early March of 1922 according to Carlos Baker (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 86) and Michael Reynolds (Hemingway: The Paris Years, 34), and she probably critiqued “Up in Michigan” that same month during a visit to Hemingway's Paris apartment.

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42 Stein, 12.

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44 Ibid., 506.

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