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The Education of Ernest Hemingway
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
To native writers emerging in the 1920s The Education of Henry Adams (1918) spoke with an immediacy and an authority now difficult to reconstruct. Sherwood Anderson, whose own Winesburg, Ohio (1919) would soon become another model for young writers, was puzzled by Adams's book. But he was intrigued enough by it to grapple with its ideas in the pages of his own autobiography. Scott Fitzgerald, who as a child had known Adams, not only studied the Education but paid its author a writer's compliment by putting him into This Side of Paradise. At one point, in fact, Fitzgerald had even decided to call his first novel The Education of a Personage. On the basis of the Education T. S. Eliot branded Adams a ‘sceptical patrician’, damning him as an ineffectual product of his New England heritage, but not disdaining, all the while, to snap up from die Education images and phrases for his own poetry. Ernest Hemingway, who consciously sided with Eliot on absolutely nothing, would have found himself, had the occasion forced itself, hard put to disagree with Eliot's radier summary judgement of Adams. Nevertheless, all things considered, it remains my conviction that one important way in which Hemingway's work resembles Eliot's, and both resemble Fitzgerald's, is that in certain basic characteristics it is what it is because of The Education of Henry Adams.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974
References
1 The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Turnbull, Andrew (New York, 1963), pp. 137–8Google Scholar; and Dan Piper, Henry, F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Critical Portrait (New York, Chicago and San Francisco, 1965), pp. 45 and 47.Google Scholar
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6 The Education of Henry Adams (Boston and New York, 1918), pp. 384–5Google Scholar. In A Story Teller's Story (New York, 1924), pp. 378–9Google Scholar, the text is quoted with slighr modifications.
7 A Moveable Feast (New York, 1964), p. 85.Google Scholar
8 Two critics have called the stories ‘educative’ in the Adams sense. (1) Carlos Baker suggests that the Nick Adams stories ‘might be arranged under some such title as “The Education of Nicholas Adams”’, but he does not tackle the question of influence (Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, third edition [Princeton, 1963], p. 128)Google Scholar. (2) Roger Asselineau organizes several stories under the same rubric, ‘L'Education de Nick Adams’, in his two-volume Pléiade edition of Oeuvres Romanesques d'Ernest Hemingway (Paris, 1968), vol. I, pp. 1–75Google Scholar. In an endnote Asselineau explains that he has adapted the title from Adams, Henry (vol. I, p. 1366).Google Scholar
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24 Baker, Carlos, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York, 1969), p. 406.Google Scholar