1 - Spokesperson for the Lost Generation (1924–1932)

Summary

THE STORY OF HEMINGWAY's STRUGGLES as an aspiring writer in Paris during the early 1920s has been reported in detail by his biographers. Under the tutelage of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford, he worked at stories and poems, diligently sending them out and collecting rejection slips. Even in these trying times, Hemingway had no interest in being “discovered” by future generations; he wanted to be recognized in his own lifetime, to make money from his fiction, and eventually be acclaimed as one of the great writers of his time. One might not have thought that his first publications—a slim volume of poems and stories followed by a collection of spare tales—would have gained him much attention. Fortunately for Hemingway, however, he had a friend who knew a friend. The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, already acknowledged as a writer of some talent, made sure Hemingway's work was noticed by his Princeton acquaintance Edmund Wilson, then establishing a reputation that would one day make him the most respected critic of his day. Without giving too much weight to this connection, it seems sufficient to employ the timeworn cliché, “the rest is history.”

Early Reviews

Though two reviews of Hemingway's earliest publications in the first volume of the transatlantic review predate Wilson's, his review of Three Stories and Ten Poems and in our time in the Dial (1924) can be considered the first important assessment of Hemingway's ability and an accurate barometer of his potential. Wilson gets right to the point, opening with the observation that “Mr. Hemingway's poems are not particularly important, but his prose is of the first distinction” (340). He writes with a “naiveté of language” that “serves actually to convey profound emotions and complex states of mind.” This new style is “a distinctly American development in prose” (341). With this brief notice, Wilson, himself only twenty-eight, anointed the twenty-five-year-old Hemingway the coming man in American fiction.

Wilson's opinion was reinforced by reviews of Hemingway's next publication, the 1925 collection of short stories titled In Our Time—the same title as his earlier book, but with conventional title capitalization.