Teaching Hemingway and War

In 1925, Ernest Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald that “the reason you are so sore you missed the war is because the war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.” Though a world war veteran for seven years, at the time he wrote Fitzgerald, Hemingway had barely scratched the surface of his war experiences in his writing, yet it would be a subject he could never resist. As an eyewitness to the emergence of modern warfare, through the Second World War, and as a writer devoted to recreating experience on the page, Ernest Hemingway has gifted us with an oeuvre of wartime representation ideal for the classroom.