Week 3 Post

 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 landscape.  

    In terms of my project goals, I think this last week I made the most progress on my third goal, which was to try and understand how Hemingway's and Stein's work influenced each other. Ultimately, I've come to believe that their relationship was pretty one-sided. Stein was Hemingway's mentor, a critical reader of his work, and his teacher in the craft of writing. I think Stein's influence can be clearly seen in the "classic" Hemingway sentence structure, which shares the simplistic, short, and punctuation-light style of some of Stein's earlier works.  

    Moving forward, I'd like to focus most of my attention on my second goal, which is to try to connect Stein and Hemingway with their broader environments. I feel I've got a pretty good grasp on how both authors write (by which I mean their style) and on the particulars of their individual biographies, but I still don't have a good understanding of the way the time in which they lived influenced their writing. Basically, I'd like to understand how Stein and Hemingway fit into their historical era. To that end, I'll focus the last week of the project primarily on the literary criticism of Stein and Hemingway, with the goal of answering this question: In what way is their writing "of their time?"