In the middle of the 20th century, the two great dogs of the American literary scene were William Faulkner And Ernest Hemingway. The two were revered international, the two were masters of the novel and the news, and the two won Nobel Prize winners.
Born in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote allegorical southern stories in a style that is both elliptical and difficult. His works were marked by uses of the flow of consciousness and changing points of view. He too Privileged titically sentencesHolding the file to have, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the longest sentence in literature. Open your copy of Absalom! Absalom! in chapter 6 and You will find it. Hemingway, on the other hand, celebrated the flowery prose of the Books of the Victorian era in short, lactiously simple and deceptfully simple sentences. His stories focused on cosmopolitan people without root, damaged in exotic places like Paris or the Serengeti.
If you type “Faulkner and Hemingway” in your favorite search engine, you will probably come across this famous exchange – Faulkner on Hemingway: “It has never been known to use a word that could send a reader to the dictionary.” Hemingway: “Poor Faulkner. Do you really think that great emotions come from big words?” Zing! Faulkner would not mean that the line presents itself as an insult, but Hemingway took one. The incident ended up being the most acrimonious of the complicated relationship of the two authors.
While Faulkner and Hemingway never officially met, they were regular correspondents, and everyone was very aware of the talents of the other. And they were competitive with each other, especially Hemingway which was much more unsure than you could assume of his Macho character. While Hemingway regularly called Faulkner “the best of all of us”, amazing his natural capacities, he also hammered Faulkner to use towers. Like he wrote has Harvey Breitthe famous criticism for THE New York Times“If you have to write the longest sentence in the world to give a book distinction, the next thing you should hire Bill Veek (sic) and use dwarfs. »»
Faulkner, for his part, was no less competitive. He said once the New York Herald Tribune“I think he is the best we have.” On the other hand, he bristled when a publisher said that Hemingway writes the preface to Portable Faulkner In 1946. “It seems to me to the wrong taste to ask him to write a preface to my things. It is like asking a racing horse in the middle of a race to broadcast a presentation text on another horse in the same land.”
When Breit asked Faulkner to write a criticism of the news from Hemingway in 1952 The old man and the seaHe refused. However, when a few months later, he obtained the same request from the literary newspaper of the University of Washington and Lee, ShenandoahFaulkner gave in, praise kept in the novel in a review of a paragraph. You can read it below.
His best. Time can show it as the best unique piece of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a creator. Until now, his men and women had been made, have shaped out of their own clay; Their victories and their defeats were in their hands from each other, just to prove themselves to them or their others how difficult they could be. But this time, he wrote on pity: about something that did them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks that had to steal the old man from his fish; They made them all and loved them all and have them all mercy. It's good. Rent God that everything that did and love and pity Hemingway and I preventing him from touching him further.
And you can also look below a fascinating speech by the scientist Joseph Fruscione on the way Faulkner and Hemingway have contributed and influenced. He wrote the book, Faulkner and Hemingway: biography of a literary rivalry.
Note: a previous version of this article appeared on our site in 2014.
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Rare film 1952: William Faulkner on his native soil in Oxford, Mississippi
Jonathan Crow is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter and other publications.
