Published July 28, 2026
The Hemingway style—terse, direct, formidable, in both prose and personal deportment—dominated American literature and the native ideal of manliness for much of the twentieth century. His suicide in 1961, at the age of sixty-one, took most of the luster off his reputation for courage; but subsequent biographers have restored some of that virile cachet by recording the almost unbelievable succession of serious injuries and illnesses that bedeviled him for most of his life. It is astonishing that he managed to hold fast as long as he did while suffering so intensely.
Hemingway conceived his signature prose style as a way to reckon with suffering. A man who knows his worth does not bare the painful underside of his soul; he keeps his agonies to himself. He is on familiar terms with death and has learned to contain his fear. And while he enjoys the good things in life more than most others do, he is laconic in even his most extravagant appreciations: He knows pleasures are not made to last. As Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1926 of his failing marriage, “Our life is all gone to hell, which seems to be the one thing you can count on a good life to do.”
While his flagrant adultery was destroying his first marriage, he was also writing The Sun Also Rises, whose centenary year this is. In this first novel of his (if you don’t count his Sherwood Anderson parody, The Torrents of Spring), the style serves a necessary new moral calculus one step removed from flaming nihilism—the desperate effort to avoid despair that was the hallmark of the Lost Generation, who never recovered from the ravages of the Great War.
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Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.
