Hemingway and Faulkner in Their Time

Book excerpt: John Steinbeck Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner are generally recognized as the most influential American novelists of the 20th century. Their careers paralleled one another in significant ways - two of their fledgling poems coincidentally appeared in the same avant-garde little magazine; they died a year apart, almost to the day; each won the Nobel Prize. It is as much biography as critique, a short, happy reference work that sometimes tells more about the commentators than their subjects. Among the writers on the writers, there is Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Conrad Aiken, W. H. Auden, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and many others. This book is not only a valuable addition to literary scholarship, it is also a unique re-creation of an era in American culture.