Why Hemingway still matters

This year will be sixty-three years since Ernest Hemingway took his own life. He was 61 and a towering presence in literature. His life was marked by enormous creativity, public myth, and private suffering. Six decades later, his literary legacy remains undiminished. Hemingway wasn’t just one of the great American novelists of the 20th century. He changed the way fiction was written.

His influence on modern writing is unparalleled. He revolutionised the short story, made dialogue sharper and more lifelike, and proved that what you leave out is just as important as what you put in.

That’s why, if you are not already, you should be reading him. If you’re unsure where to begin or have questions, continue reading.

Hemingway’s influence on other writers

His sparse, muscular prose has been mimicked endlessly, but never quite matched. Ezra Pound called him "the finest prose stylist in the world." Wallace Stevens said he was "the most significant of living poets." William Faulkner praised him as "the strictest in principles, the severest of craftsmen."

Writers from Joan Didion to Ralph Ellison copied out Hemingway’s sentences in longhand, trying to understand their rhythm and weight. Gabriel García Márquez said Hemingway taught him the science of writing. Even Derek Walcott once declared: "Hemingway's prose is an achievement superior to anything in poetry."

The writers Hemingway influenced

It’s hard to think of a 20th-century writer untouched by Hemingway’s work. Some, like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, adopted his stripped-back style almost wholesale. Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is practically a textbook in Hemingway’s technique of emotional understatement. Ford’s Rock Springs explores similar themes of masculinity and quiet desperation.

Others, like Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, pushed against Hemingway’s simplicity to create something equally powerful but very different. McCarthy’s The Road echoes Hemingway’s stoic bleakness, while Morrison’s Beloved does the opposite, embracing layered lyricism to explore memory and trauma.

Then there are writers like Bret Easton Ellis and Denis Johnson, who modernised Hemingway’s themes of alienation, masculinity, and detachment for their own generations. You can hear Hemingway’s influence in the spare coolness of Less Than Zero, or the raw, staggering power of Jesus’ Son.

His fingerprints are also on writers of nonfiction. Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace all explored subjectivity and voice while still striving for clarity and precision, one of Hemingway’s great gifts to American prose. Didion even admitted she started writing because of A Farewell to Arms.

The brilliance of his sentences — 9 examples

What Hemingway left behind is a body of work filled with unforgettable lines. Some of them feel like aphorisms, others like emotional uppercuts.

• “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

• “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

• “Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

• “Courage is grace under pressure.”

• “I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”

• “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

• “Never confuse movement with action.”

• “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

• “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

His prose could be brutal and beautiful at once. It is rarely explained. It showed. It trusted readers to feel the weight between the lines.

The five Hemingway books to start with

1. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) – A slim, allegorical masterpiece about an old fisherman and a marlin. Hemingway’s final novel, and the one that earned him the Nobel Prize. This novel often tops the list of greatest novels. It is short and powerful, showing the power of what short fiction can do (and which is having something of a renaissance).

2. A Farewell to Arms (1929) – A tragic love story set during World War I. Autobiographical in tone, it’s one of the most potent war novels ever written. It was written when Hemingway was 30-years old.

3. The Sun Also Rises (1926) – A portrait of the Lost Generation in postwar Europe. Cool, disillusioned, and full of suppressed yearning.

4. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) – An epic set during the Spanish Civil War, grappling with death, duty, and the meaning of sacrifice.

5. To Have and Have Not (1937) – A lesser-known novel but a vivid, politically charged portrait of class, desperation, and the American underbelly. Rough, urgent, and underrated.

Final thoughts

Hemingway's life was tragic, complex, and often mythologised. But his impact on writing remains immense. His best work still speaks with startling clarity and force. If you want to write, or just read something that will stay with you, start here.

And remember his own words: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Start with that. Hemingway did.