Hemingway’s brand had a big impact on the literary world and what it means to be an American author. Before Hemingway, the popular idea of the American writer was someone private and intellectual, confined to both a writing desk and the literary sphere.
There were exceptions to this image that came before Hemingway, such as Mark Twain, but none of them achieved the level of celebrity for their personal lives that Hemingway did. Hemingway’s public persona not only changed this conception, it nearly replaced it, fueling new stereotypes and influencing the actions of writers after him [Ibid.].
His work, too, was impactful. His unique deceptively simple literary style honed during his time as a news writer is often imitated. He won Nobel and Pulitzer prizes for his work. If you want to write in Hemingway’s style, look no further than the Hemingway Editor app!
Beyond imitation, countless writers cite him as an influence. Some of those writers were the pioneers of the hard-boiled noir genre, with rugged private detectives on the page taking cues from Hemingway’s characters and his own life [3]. Others were the founders of the minimalist literary movement. Even people in marketing and business analyze Hemingway’s style and apply it to advertisements and copy for a simple but bold effect.
How Hemingway’s Writing Influence Lives on Today
- His novels and stories remain popular: The Sun Also Rises is #25 in TIME magazine’s list of Top 100 Novels of All Time.
- His writing technique is still used: The Iceberg Theory, or Theory of Omission, is Hemingway’s minimalistic writing technique in which the writing is spare, and the underlying themes are never explicitly discussed. This technique is used by the Hemingway Editor App to improve people’s writing. It is also the style in which all of Hemingway’s dialog in the 2011 film Midnight in Paris is written.
- His words still resonate: In her 2020 song “Invisible String” Taylor Swift echoes the final words of Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.
