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Week 4 Post

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    ( A Winter's Promise  wasn't part of the project, but I do highly recommend)          Self-Reflection:      My initial goals for this project were threefold. First, to read as much Stein and Hemingway material as possible; second, to understand how the authors' environments influenced their work; and third, to understand how the authors influenced one another. These goals stayed pretty constant over the course of my project and, in a final analysis, I think I made progress on each front. For the first goal, I certainly succeeded in reading a large quantity of Stein's and Hemingway's work. In the end, I read eight books, five by Hemingway, two by Stein, and one book about Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas. As to the second goal, I think I researched both authors' lives enough to begin to place them within their historical epoch. In particular, I found it helpful, whenever Stein or Hemingway mentioned a contemporary (whi...
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Week 3 Post

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 Progress Report:  This past week I finished The Sun Also Rises, read Two Lives (a biography about Stein), and got about halfway through Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. I also made a little pilgrimage out to Ketchum, Idaho (where he lived in the last years of his life) to see various Hemingway sites.      Hemingway's typewriter    A bust of Hemingway in the Ketchum Historical Museum     The Hemingway memorial near a lodge where he stayed       Overall, I had a great time visiting Ketchum. I didn't learn all that many new things about Hemingway's life, but I found it very moving to visit a particular site or see a particular object and know that Hemingway had been in that place or used that object. Further, even without the Hemingway connection, Ketchum is a lovely place to visit. I particularly enjoyed the drive out to Ketchum, my mother joined me on the trip and we read Two Lives aloud while watching the lan...
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Week 2 Post

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       Funny Story:       As I was researching Hemingway, I came upon a rather funny story about his time in Paris in the 50s. During that period, Hemingway was great friends with the Irish novelist James Joyce, with whom he would often go out drinking. Apparently, Joyce would often get into fights with people in the bars the two writers frequented. Joyce was a rather slight man, so whenever conflict looked imminent he would point at his antagonist and shout to Hemingway "Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!"  Progress Report:    This past week I finished the Hemingway short stories and Stein's 3 Lives, I also read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and got about halfway through Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. In terms of the research portion of the project, I didn't get a chance to watch the Ken Burns documentary and the Stein biography hasn't been delivered yet, but I did manage to do some online research on both author...
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Week 1 Post

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Summary:        For my senior project, I've decided to read the works of two prominent authors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. I think, ultimately, I had several motivations for choosing this particular project. The first is that I've always wanted to spend a significant amount of time absorbing the writing of an important author, that is, somebody who is perceived to be central to the literary canon. Second, I've always wanted to really get to know a particular author, to feel that I had a good grasp of not just their work itself, but also the motivations behind it. With that in mind, I selected Hemingway and Stein a) because I'd heard good things about both of them but hadn't really read their work before and b) because I felt that there was something to be gained from reading them together. I knew that Stein and Hemingway were contemporaries, and I knew that Stein had been sort of a mentor figure to Hemingway ...
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