Fifty Years of Hemingway Criticism

Hays, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, has collected his writings about Hemingway published over 50 years in such sources as The Hemingway Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Studies in Humanities. The 32 essays cover such topics as Hemingway’s style, themes, and reading, autobiographical elements in his fiction, his debts to such writers as Herman Melville, Henry James, and William Faulkner, and teaching Hemingway. There are essays about the cinematic quality of his style, his clinical depression, and similarities between 'The Killers' and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. One of the most interesting essays explains parallels between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises. Hays has updated the endnotes for older essays and provides an extensive bibliography. There is a name and title index, as well as seven photographs. The collection serves as a good introduction to Hemingway studies and also demonstrates the variety of approaches to interpreting his novels and stories. * American Reference Books Annual *
If you want to explore the works of Ernest Hemingway and gain surprising insight into the Nobel Laureate's life and timeless characters, the go-to scholar is University of California English professor emeritus Peter L. Hays of Sacramento. His collection of erudite essays, Fifty Years of Hemingway Criticism, includes a fascinating chapter that shows the simularities between Papa and James Bond. * The Sacramento Bee *
Peter L. Hays, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of California-Davis, has spent nearly half a century chronicling the many themes, suggestions, myths, legends, and ideas found in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway. In Fifty Years of Hemingway Criticism, Hays highlights both his pedagogic and scholarly contributions to Hemingway criticism in essays that blend literary analysis with accounts of teaching practice while tackling nearly every aspect of the author’s career. Hays cuts a wide swath through the critical tradition surrounding Hemingway’s work as he addresses dominant themes such as courage, fathers and sons, sex, rituals, male/female relationships, wounding, and artistic influence. With source material spanning over fifty years, the collection catalogues Hemingway criticism as much as Hemingway himself. . . . As a collection, Hays’ book provides a wide range of classroom and critical possibilities. He grants credence to both major and minor texts, an important exercise when dealing with Hemingway’s canonical weight, and his choices help us stay conscious of our scholarly choices, especially in a critical land- scape as vast as Hemingway’s. . . Professor Hays has produced a significant collection of scholarly endurance meant to introduce and promote the reading, teaching, and studying of Ernest Hemingway. Readers of Hemingway will find something inherently important in Hays’ collection, especially when realizing the man has spent the majority of his adult life wrestling with a literary giant. * The Hemingway Review *