I've only read Old Man and the Sea, but I found him to be quite compelling, and I liked his style, despite how easy it is to poke fun.

For those of you who haven't been following critical Hemingway studies over the last ten years, much of it has been filtered through the lens of his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden.

Which is a book that Hemingway was afraid to have come out during his lifetime because it was too revealing and contains a lot of fluid gender play and role-playing.

The upshot of which is that that the machismo in Hemingway's work is seen much more as a kind of gender-performance, a kind of male drag, if you will.

The Garden of Eden isn't his best work (though I do like it a lot), but it has recast his earlier work in a different light.

As for his writing style, it was famously influential (particularly to journalists) and has been endlessly parodied. I think style is the most personal aspect of writing (whereas many people oddly seem to think of it as curlicues and icing on the cake), so it's hard for me to criticize a writer based on their style if the writing is good. It may not be to my taste, but there's nothing wrong with the way Hemingway wrote. It's an entirely defensible, lean, muscular (ooh! Macho!) prose style. If you don't like it, that's fine, but that's not really a flaw in Hemingway's work. It's a matter of taste.

erika, I really enjoyed The Sun Also Rises after loathing every short story and Farewell to Arms.

It's not his style I take issue with, though I'm certainly not a fan. It's his fucking characters who all make me want to kill them. And the entire blank flatness of his women. Do not like.

Oh, but like more than Mark Twain, to give you a bar to understand how little I enjoy Twain.

Kat is me except for disliking Twain, which is just crazy talk.

I'm glad the fashion in writing is moving away from "Hemingway is the way you should be writing." For a while much of the advice I read held up Hemingway as an ideal.

Like Pix & Kat, I hate Hemingway, but like The Sun Also Rises. I am kind of indifferent to Twain. I do like the musical Big RIver!

I've tried to read Innocents Abroad, but I couldn't get past the snide. That may be Twain being sarcastic about Americans being snide abroad, but I already knew that Americans can be stupid about other cultures. I don't need to have a potentially interesting traveloge of mid-19th century Europe messed up with irony.

I thought it was funny, but I like him, so it's easier to be patient. Because to a modern person, it's not all hilarious. Connie, people do say that he revolutionized novels by making dialogue more natural and whatnot. I mean, I don't suppose there'd be Raymond Carver without Hemingway, although the drinking and masculinity tends to bite those guys in the butt, rather than get glamourous.

For a while much of the advice I read held up Hemingway as an ideal.

I think some of his techniques were effective, but no one wants a whole generation of writers imitating one particular voice or style. Dialogue *is* more realistic when it's natural, for instance.

Dialogue *is* more realistic when it's natural, for instance.

I really love Madeleine L'Engle's books (for adults and kids/teens), but no one in the history of EVER talks like her dialogue.