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INTRODUCTION Steve Paul, Gail Sinclair, and Steven Trout Ernest Hemingway was not yet nineteen years old when he both launched his writing career and absorbed the brutal force of war into body and soul. Fresh out of high school, the kid from Oak Park, Illinois, landed in what might seem the unlikeliest of places. First came his apprenticeship in a smoky Kansas City newsroom, which introduced Hemingway to the gritty underbelly of an ambitious crossroads burg and, perhaps, inspired his first serious reflections on the artistic potentialities of a stripped-down, unflinchingly direct literary style. Then came Fossalta on the Piave River in Italy, where on July 8, 1918, a machine-gun bullet and the fragments of a trenchmortar shell ripped into the teenager’s flesh, giving him firsthand experience of military violence—and a traumatic intimation of mortality—that would play a significant role in the writing to come. Comprised of eighteen original essays, War + Ink reimagines the Hemingway of the World War I era—the cub reporter as well as the thrill-seeking Red Cross volunteer and the wounded war hero—and then focuses on the writer’s life and works in the 1920s, arguably his most fruitful decade. Hemingway’s early adulthood (1917–1929) was marked by his work as a journalist, the war, marriage, conflicts with parents, expatriation, and his struggles to make inroads as a writer of stories and novels that would get him noticed. This might seem like overly familiar scholarly territory. However, while numerous critics have recounted Hemingway’s personal journey through the 1910s and 1920s, our understanding of the young Hemingway and his early writings continues to evolve. And there is still much more to learn. This collection, which presents work by veteran and emerging Hemingway scholars alongside that of experts in related fields (including social and cultural historians of the Great War and researchers ix x INTRODUCTION in American Studies), breaks important new ground in four ways: first, by reframing Hemingway’s formative experiences in Kansas City; second, by establishing a fresh set of contexts for his Italian adventure in 1918 and his novels and stories of the 1920s; third, by offering some provocative reflections on Hemingway’s fiction and the issue of truth telling in war literature; and fourth, by reexamining Hemingway’s later career (and later works, such as Across the River and into the Trees and The Fifth Column) in terms of themes, issues, or places tied to the writer’s early life. The essays vary in terms of methodology, theoretical assumptions, and scope; what they share is an eagerness to question—and to look beyond—truisms that have long prevailed in Hemingway scholarship. Nearly sixty years have passed since any Hemingway biographer spent more than a few pages exploring the writer’s time in Kansas City. This scholarly oversight, which the first two essays in this collection seek to correct, has arguably handicapped our understanding of America’s most important twentieth-century writer. As Charles A. Fenton put it (back in 1954): From Kansas City Hemingway took with him not only the lessons he had learned about writing but also a trained reporter’s eye which would enable him to profit considerably more from his Italian experiences than if, for example, he had been able to enlist directly from high school the previous June. He took with him too a reservoir of material upon which he could draw when he began his serious writing in 1919. . . . Those had been seven lucky months in 1917 and 1918; Hemingway had made the most of them. (49) And he would go on making the most of them. As several of the essays in this volume demonstrate, Kansas City is a surprisingly ubiquitous place—and signifier—in Hemingway’s short fiction and novels. The Kansas City period has a direct connection to at least two of his full-length short stories (“A Pursuit Race” and “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”), and its echoes can be heard in works ranging from the often cryptic vignettes that comprise the original version of in our time (1924) to, as Matthew Nickel reveals in his contribution to this volume, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), a late text that seems, at first sight, far removed from the American Midwest. That Jake Barnes, the central character in The Sun Also Rises (1926), is a wounded veteran of the war and an expatriate journalist from [18.217.144.32] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 11...

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