This research examines the role and influence of Ernest Hemingway on the modernist era of literature. The research will set Hemingway's works in historical and cultural context and then discuss how the environment in which Hemingway produced his literature was reflected in the novels that made his reputation. In particular, reference will be made to ways in which Hemingway's novels found parallels between narrative action and the social changes taking place during the first half of the 20th century, and with the life of the author himself, with a view toward identifying implications that the texts had for novelists and novels that would appear afterward.
Whatever else was in the background of Ernest Hemingway's shotgun suicide in 1961, the fact that he used a gun and not, say, poison or sleeping pills speaks to the popular image of the he-man at home with weapons he knew very well how to use. In a way, the suicide was like the life that had preceded it, what with Hemingway's continual recourse in his novels to the culture (not to say cult) of the man's man who functioned gracefully in the most violent and dangerous situations--and who was also devastatingly attracted and attractive to women. The suicide was also something that the ordinary observer of Hemingway might not have expected, given Hemingway's "terrifying belief that suicide was a cowardly, unmanly act" (Lynn 107). In any case, Lynn says that Hemingway's "man's man" presentation had the effect of inciting controversy in the discourse of his work (9). Lynn cites attacks on Hemingway's persona of manliness from Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Max Eastman.
Yet it is not as if Hemingway created his fictional universe out of whole cloth. He appears to have sought out--or anyway not run away from--opportunities to test his mettle against other men and the effects of the test on men and women alike (as a Red Cross medic in World War I and in A Farewell to Arms); against ...