Hemingway as the Godfather of Long-Form

Ernest Hemingway was one of the great innovators in literary form. His apparent renunciation of stylistic flourishes—the absence of lyrical rhetoric, the spare sketching of context, the paring of narrative voice to short, stark strokes—was the style of no style, an aesthetic obsession so fanatical and so closely linked to Hemingway’s sense of personal bearing and way of life that it comes off, in retrospect, as an inverse dandyism. Hemingway’s way of writing was also inseparable from his physically vigorous subjects, such as war, hunting, fishing, and bullfighting—and, early on, his notion of literary achievement was agonistic. In Lillian Ross’s majestic Profile of Hemingway, published in The New Yorker, in 1950, he likened his fiction-writing to boxing—with Turgenev, Maupassant, and Stendhal.