Ernest Hemingway vs. William Faulkner (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Ernest Hemingway vs. William Faulkner (2017)

edamurray.com

34 pointsfnord7724 comments

> Rarely do literary names get tossed around when speaking of such rivalries, but in the 1950’s arguably the two biggest names in the industry took a shot at one another.

This was far from the only feud. Hemingway got in a fist fight with Wallace Stevens--or perhaps the other way around. Hemingway knocked him out. [0] Stevens also feuded with Robert Frost but it apparently stopped short of fisticuffs. Writers of yore were feisty indeed.

[0] https://www.kwls.org/key-wests-life-of-letters/ernest_heming...

Remarkable behavior for someone whose day job was insurance executive.

>> took a shot at one another

which doesn't necessarily mean a "feud," a rather strong word i find. if faulkner and hemingway had such a "feud" why would faulker say the following in his art of fiction interview: "If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us."

> This was far from the only feud. Hemingway got in a fist fight with Wallace Stevens--or perhaps the other way around.

who hasn't been in a fist fight with a friend by day and met later that same day without a word about the quarrel, implicitly disregarding it as mere heatful play of the moment. but otherwise, wallace stevens is on my to-read list after having read "The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm"[1], you might enjoy it

1: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57607/the-house-was-q...

As I recall, Stevens was considerably older than Hemingway at the time.

teaching ego-ridden[1] younger brother a lesson, i presume?

1: my perception/judgment of hemingway is poor (i haven't read him yet; i do have the old man and the sea lying around here somewhere) - so poor it's strictly based off my viewing of midnight in paris

I came across a story (which Google, alas, was unable to locate) how Faulkner supposedly didn’t keep a dictionary at home. And so whenever he had to look something up, he’d take a walk down to the drugstore in town, which luckily kept a dictionary on hand for him to use. The writer suggested this may explain Faulkner’s occasionally idiosyncratic use of some words—usage that, while at times may have been incorrect, coming as it does from a Nobel laureate, nevertheless altered the dictionaries he didn’t have.

https://amsaw.org/amsaw-ithappenedinhistory-092503-faulkner.... may be what you are looking for.

``` He wrote all of his books in longhand, often struggling with words and definitions. He didn't own a dictionary. Often, he would make up his own words to suit the moment, combine two words into one, or turn nouns into verbs and vice versa. If he couldn't spell something, he would walk down to the local drugstore and ask someone there to look it up for him. Sometimes, he would stop people on the street and ask them for the meaning of a word. "I'm looking for a word. It means the same as 'running fast' but I don't want to use 'running fast.'" ```

This is a remarkably facile discussion of an interesting relationship, and I was hoping for more substance than what's here. The conclusion feels like something I might have done in more than one 100-level American Lit midterm essay.

I honestly thought it was written by a bot. It’s very reminiscent of the AI-generated recaps of tweets the internet is littered with these days.

> Don’t be fooled by the big words attempting to yield big emotion. But likewise, don’t be fooled by the big emotion attempting to yield unquestioned belief.

It was just occurring to me, seeing a headline about the dearth of debate in the schedule for primaries, how little substantive policy is considered at election time.

The government is insolvent, so we get a high school personality contest in lieu of a substantial choice for a corrective course.

My grandfather was a young writer living in Spain a long time ago. At one point he wrote that he saw Hemingway sitting and working in a cafe, but didn't go up to him since he didn't feel he had proven anything yet.

As a fan, I’m torn. It would’ve been amazing to chat with him, but then there was that passage (in A Moveable Feast, I think?) where he lambasts a stranger (long after the fact, in said piece) for interrupting his train of thought while writing at a cafe.

That's funny -- my grandfather wrote that other people were coming up to him.

This essay seems like something you'd write for your lit class when you realize it is due in 30 minutes.

There are much better literary feuds than this:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/09/18/typing/

Anyhow, some words I'm dying to use in my own writing aren't big at all. Like "louche".

>Access Denied - GoDaddy Website Firewall

Well this is using something even worse than cloudflare, did not think that was possible :)

Wow, sorry. This was Brave, and I just tested it in an incognito window on Chrome, and on Safari (both passed). I have no explanation.

I was just able to get to it, odd it fails and later on works. But nice article!

I checked cloudflare's website, and apparently there's a phenomenon I wasn't really aware of (although I did use Google's DNS server a long time ago): they have their own DNS server.

what are you doing that led to this error? I'm curious. I didn't see it on GoDaddy's site.

It's kind of a stretch to say an exchange of two comments is a feud.

this is just a faulkner quote and a hemingway quote in response to it plus some worthless filler

What a joke of a blogpost.

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