The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway

There was a time when every alpha-male tyro author had to read Hemingway. He was an amalgam of Stephen Crane, François Mauriac and Errol Flynn, roistering war reporter, existential swaggerer and sexual aggressor, and a superb prose stylist to boot. When in 1978 Bruce Chatwin identified the literary masters whom an aspirant novelist should emulate, he recommended Chekhov, Maupassant, Flaubert and Turgenev for their piercing concision and stylistic richness, ‘and among the Americans, early Sherwood Anderson, early Hemingway and Carson McCullers’.