This summer Library of America is pleased to partner with The Center for Fiction on an online course dedicated to our 2020 volume Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings, 1918-1926.
Led by the book’s editor, Hemingway scholar Robert W. Trogdon, the Center for Fiction reading group will explore the author’s seminal 1925 story collection In Our Time and his equally momentous 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.
The course will be held on Zoom from 6:00 to 7:30 pm ET across four Thursday evenings: June 30, July 28, August 25, and September 22. Attendees can choose to buy a copy of Library of America’s Hemingway volume when they sign up for the class.
We reached out to Trogdon, professor of English at Kent State University, to ask what inspired the course.
“The inspiration for the group was to examine in-depth the early mature writings of Hemingway—those stories and the novel that he wrote between 1922 and 1925—to outline how he developed his own style and voice,” Trogdon said via email. “He goes from being an imitator of James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and Gertrude Stein to being his own writer, one who is imitated more than he imitates. I also want to show how much Hemingway evolved in those three years, most of which were spent in Paris.”
Trogdon emphasized that the class is meant for both first-time readers and more experienced readers of Hemingway. What would he like them to take away from the four sessions?
“I hope to show that there is a level of complexity and subtlety in his work that we sometimes miss,” he told us. “More experienced readers may note echoes of his later work in these early stories and in The Sun Also Rises.
“Hemingway is more than the popular culture image we have of him as a heavy-drinking womanizer who spent the vast majority of his time hunting and fishing. Those aspects are a part of his personality and life, but he also wrote very well and created prose that is still capable of moving us a great deal. It takes a very special talent to write ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ and The Sun Also Rises. I hope that members of the reading group will be able to discover that over the course of these sessions.”
Click here to register for the Hemingway course.
