Ernest Hemingway
American novelist and 1954 Nobel laureate; the towering predecessor against whom Mailer measured himself for his whole career - a model of the writer as public man, of the prose of violence and courage, and of the contest between literature and celebrity.
Ernest Hemingway was the predecessor against whom Mailer measured himself more persistently than any other — the model of the novelist as public man, of a prose forged out of violence, courage, and grace under pressure, and of the lifelong contest between serious literature and American celebrity that Mailer would make his own subject. Mailer’s ambition was openly framed in Hemingway’s shadow from the success of The Naked and the Dead (48.2) onward; the older writer’s example shadows the boxing, the bullfighting, the bravado, and the preoccupation with style and nerve that run through Mailer’s essays and self-presentation. Mailer returned to Hemingway again and again in interviews and criticism, among them his 1982 remarks on “the power of Hemingway’s style” (82.14).
Stub created during the 1982 ingest.