William Johnston's Senior Project: Exploring Hemingway and Stein

    ( 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...

 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...