Thursday, May 8, 2008

Fun Lit Fact: Hemingway & Faulkner

Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, both of whom won Nobel Prizes for Literature, were the fiercest of literary rivals from mostly the 1920’s through the 1950’s, with polar opposite styles. Hemingway wrote from his journalistic roots: simple words, tight, straight-to-the-point sentences. Faulkner’s prose, on the other hand, was a tangled web, sometimes without punctuation, and often hiding deep symbolic imagery. Yet the two are strangely connected in the history of one Bogart and Bacall movie in 1944, “To Have or Have Not.” Hemingway wrote the novel, Faulkner’s screenplay transferred it to the big screen.

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