Hemingway’s Short Works And Long-Standing Influence On Literature: Men Without Women

Ernest Hemingway is among the most influential American writers of the 20th century, if not the most considering his title of the literary “voice of the Lost Generation” (Muller 8). However, today his innovations often go overlooked by critics and students of literature. It is hard to see an artist with fresh eyes through traditions and techniques they -- not necessarily created -- but popularized. Therefore, this thesis will seek to analyze one of Hemingway’s most successful and neglected short story collections, Men Without Women. Many of Hemingway’s craft and style techniques in Men Without Women have become norms of American fiction, so much that readers unfamiliar with the traditions that came before Hemingway may no longer even recognize them as techniques. In Men Without Women, each work focuses on at least one specific crafting element: these elements overall serve as a throughline of two strands (or theses) throughout the collection, and these strands seem to parallel throughout the work, until the final piece where they collide and reveal a deeper new approach to not only writing and craft, but the idea of a collection itself. Therefore, a major theme of the collection is poioumenon. Poioumenon in the modernist era normally referred to a story about creation. It is most often understood today, in the postmodern era, to be a story that is metafictionally about its own creation. Here, I believe the meaning of the word concerning Hemingway should be read as a story that is about the art of writing itself and how writing informs life. Men Without Women analyzes not only the strand of stories about men existing without women, but also experiments with poioumenon--the second strand--through catechizing artists without craft.