In a bit of a rush to get this out today, but wanted to republish yesterday’s Live session. This one is about a writer I’ve taught too many times, and one story I would never share with kids, by a writer who’s shaped more than he ever should have. It’s story time with Hemingway!
I’ve started doing these as a part of my ongoing Wednesday live sessions - I’ll be trying to do one a week and will occasionally have guests. It’s a work in progress.
I hope you’ll check it out
and would love to know what you think.
Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants was published in 1927, in a collection called Men Without Women.
That title alone says a lot.
So does the story, even in what it refuses to say.
It’s possibly the only realistic woman Hemingway created, but still problematic. Two Americans. A train station in Spain. A conversation so indirect it becomes a vacuum.
Not set in France, but written while Hemingway was in Paris. The silence at its core feels emblematic of something bigger.
The story typifies his style and the idea that writing should be minimalist, emotionally withheld, stripped down.
Hemingway’s now-famous “iceberg theory” suggested that the best writing shows only a sliver of what’s underneath. But what do we lose when that’s the norm? What doesn’t get said, or seen?
Styles have opened up, progressed, and more voices have been heard since, but that doesn’t mean that Hemingway’s words and style did not remain influential.
Here’s where it gets messier.
Hemingway shaped America’s idea of France - not as a real place, but as an attainable fantasy. The café table myth. The “write in exile,” “the artist discovering himself abroad” template. He lived in Paris from 1921 to 1928 as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, but lived as a foreigner & never assimilated.
Didn’t learn the language. Was often miserable.
Even as he called Paris a “moveable feast,” he felt isolated and his marriage was falling apart.
And yet his work became the blueprint for generations of MFA programs, magazine editors, and young writers trying to be serious by being spare. Of “finding their voice” in another country.
And he wasn’t alone. The so-called Lost Generation—mostly white American men, writing abroad, emphasizing minimalism & emotional detachment—got folded into the canon.
It also was hardly him.
Hemingway didn’t create the myth of himself alone—he had help.
Editors like Maxwell Perkins, publishers, and mid-century critics played a huge role in shaping Hemingway into the voice of American literary seriousness. His minimalist style wasn’t just celebrated; it was institutionalized.
It fit a post-WWI cultural appetite for a new masculinity: wounded, restrained, anti-decadent, and unmistakably American. Magazines and publishers loved it.
So the Hemingway myth isn’t just about Hemingway. It’s about how American literary culture picked a style, called it serious, and built a canon that mostly mirrored itself.
But that canon excluded so much: Gertrude Stein’s complexity. Langston Hughes minimalistic rhythms. Claude McKay’s global Black identity. Women and queer voices who didn’t fit the Hemingway mold.
And that raelly didn’t get reexamined until the 1960s.
So why read him at all?
I think the myth still lingers. Because the Paris he helped sell to Americans is still sold. And because good myths don’t die; they calcify—until we read them closely enough to break them open.
K
PS I have never read either of these stories to children. My god, no.
A few threads from this session:
What it means to mythologize Paris
The crisis of omission in Hemingway’s storytelling and American culture
How silence becomes style—and gatekeeping
Whether anything’s still redeemable in Hemingway’s stripped-down voice
Some lingering thoughts:
I don’t love Hemingway. But I can’t ignore him either.
He was a caricature of manliness, lonely, heavily mythologized man who shaped a whole genre of masculine writing. And that matters—because his influence didn’t just affect books. It helped sculpt a whole American aesthetic of exile, detachment, and emotional authority.
This story, this reading, this post – it’s not a celebration of his work, but a reconsideration of the man.
So I’ll end here:
What myths about France—or about who gets to speak—have you had to unlearn?
Drop a comment.
Share a line.
And stay tuned for next week’s story. It might be Rhys. Or Baldwin. Or McCay. Someone else worth hearing.
Appendix & Edit:
I forgot to include the downloads of versions of the stories I’d written. Here they are below!
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