The 2020s are seeing the centenaries of Ernest Hemingway’s early story collections and novels. His ground-breaking collection, In Our Time, appeared in 1925. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, followed in 1926, and by decade’s end he had published another collection (Men Without Women) and another novel (A Farewell to Arms). (His short novel parodying Sherwood Anderson, The Torrents of Spring, also came out in the mid-1920s.) This moment offers a useful occasion for revisiting the career of this influential and important author. While his work commands neither the broad attention nor the deep respect that it once did (and it is important to note that not all the work commanded much respect even when it was first published), Hemingway remains a writer to reckon with, one who, more than most others, was able to capture in new forms and new rhetorical styles the wrenching dislocations of modernity and the cultural and moral wreckage wrought by modern warfare. He was also one of the first writers to take full advantage of emergent cultures of print and literary celebrity in the twentieth century, rising to a level of worldwide visibility that few writers before or since have attained.

As such a popular and recognized author both during his lifetime and during the first decades after his death (especially as posthumous publications kept him in the pages of literary reviews), Hemingway has been the subject of a vast scholarly industry, and his work has not lacked introductory texts about it. Overviews of his career began to appear ten years before he died in 1961, and many have been published in the decades since then. Each new generation of readers and scholars, though, has found in Hemingway’s work new grounds for engagement, and his work continues to benefit both from detailed scholarly reading and from introductory texts that take into account the insights gained by that reading. This introduction sets out to do that useful work, surveying the career and reminding readers of what many have often found in the stories, novels, and nonfiction books while also indicating some of the new ways that changing methods of analysis and new critical questions have reopened even the most familiar of these texts. The chapters that follow treat Hemingway’s most highly regarded and oft-read work in greater detail while providing introductions to all of the work that he published. The discussions are connected by a few overarching themes that are worth noting from the start. First and foremost, Hemingway is treated here as what he most fundamentally was: a restlessly experimental writer, one driven to supersede not only the traditions he inherited but also his own earlier work. No one can claim that he was always (or even usually) a successful experimenter, but even some of his flawed or failed work is useful to read for its attempts at achieving what he called the higher dimensions that were possible for literary writing. One area his experiments were focused on was the representation in literary fiction and nonfiction of an ever-greater range of human experience and expression. Hemingway pushed constantly and irritably (perhaps also irritatingly) against the boundaries of readers’ taste and tolerance, risking (and receiving) censorship both informal and formal as he did so. An unfortunate corollary to this focus is the appearance in his work of social attitudes that were part of the total reality he sought to represent; it is simply the case that misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia recur throughout his work. At the same time, Hemingway sought to understand and give expression to a range of desires and possible sexual selves that his society made no visible space for. Finally, as a writer who had experienced both physical and psychological wounds in the First World War and as a person who lived afterward with both visible and invisible disabilities, Hemingway explored, often without seeming to realize that he was doing so, the ways of being in the world specifically available to people who are disabled. More than most have done to date, this introduction attends to this important aspect of Hemingway’s work.