William Johnston's Senior Project: Exploring Hemingway and Stein

       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...

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 ...