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Books

The unimportance of Ernest Hemingway: why should we bother reading him anymore?

26 January 2019

9:00 AM

26 January 2019

9:00 AM

What is the most repulsive sentence in English/American literature? Even as a 12-year-old American boy, I cringed when reading, in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls: ‘But did thee feel the earth move?’ At school I bought the myth of Hemingway as the master craftsman of American letters, teaching us to keep our sentences short and our syllables few.

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