Ernest Hemingway vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald stand out as two of the most renowned American fiction writers of the 20th century. Though they were contemporaries and friends, they presented different perspectives and styles that came to define the vibrant “Lost Generation” literary scene of the 1920s.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald first met in Paris in 1925, where both were expatriate writers and key members of the Modernist artistic movement. They continued an ambivalent friendship until Hemingway’s death in 1961. Today, scholars and readers often compare their works and lives as emblematic of Jazz Age America and its themes of excess, alienation, and changing social mores.

Both authors became famous for their spare, direct prose styles and incisive short stories and novels. However, Hemingway embraced a tough, stoic machismo in his writing that differed greatly from Fitzgerald’s more romantic and lyrical sensibilities. Their great novels of the 1920s, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, exemplify these divergent worldviews and continue to be regarded as masterpieces of 20th century fiction.

Early Lives and Influences

Hemingway and Fitzgerald came from very different backgrounds that shaped their perspectives and writing.

Hemingway grew up in suburban Oak Park, Illinois. After graduating high school, he left home to become a newspaper reporter and serve in World War I as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. These formative experiences developed in Hemingway a stoic attitude and an appreciation for soldierly virtues like courage and sacrifice.

In contrast, Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota to an upper class Catholic family. He attended Princeton University before joining the army and meeting Southern debutante Zelda Sayre, whom he desperately wanted to marry. Fitzgerald’s youth among the Ivy League elite and his doomed relationship with Zelda provided source material for much of his fiction.

Their backgrounds manifest clearly in their writing. Hemingway’s direct prose and detached attitude in novels like A Farewell to Arms reflect his reporter’s eye and war-time trauma. Fitzgerald’s lavish depictions of wealth, class, and social ambition in The Great Gatsby stem from his own youthful experiences and desires.

Writing Styles and Themes

Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s different upbringings are apparent in their contrasting writing styles and thematic interests.

Hemingway pioneered a forceful minimalist style characterized by short declarative sentences and an economy of words. His prose is concrete and unsentimental, even stoic at times. Themes of masculinity, war, sports, and adventure typify his fiction. Much of his work examines grace under pressure and the harsh costs of violence.

In contrast, Fitzgerald’s writing style was more ornate and lyrical. He used flowing descriptive language and imaginative metaphors to convey emotions and sensory experiences. His fiction often focuses on themes of wealth, social status, glamour, excess, and the carefree excess of the Jazz Age and youth culture. Female characters like Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby reflect his lifelong fascination with Zelda and idealized femininity.

These stylistic differences reflect the authors’ real-life personalities. Hemingway sought to live up to masculine ideals and adventures, while Fitzgerald embodied Jazz Age materialism and youth. Their writing remains distinctive for its powerful prose and insights into American society.

Major Works

Hemingway and Fitzgerald produced some of their most acclaimed writings during the 1920s that secured their literary legacies.

Hemingway’s early short story collections like In Our Time and Men Without Women established his minimalist voice and interest in stoic, masculine themes. His first major novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) captures the malaise of the Lost Generation through its account of British and American expats in Europe after World War I. A Farewell to Arms (1929) added to Hemingway’s war fiction and cemented his international fame.

Fitzgerald released his debut novel This Side of Paradise in 1920, followed by short story collections centered on young love and privilege. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), charts a Jazz Age couple’s drifting descent into aimlessness. However, his magnum opus is the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, widely considered Fitzgerald’s masterpiece for its poetic style and scholarship on American wealth and hedonism in the 1920s.

Both authors released their iconic 1920s novels at the height of their creativity and fame as leading “Lost Generation” voices. Their lasting reputations rest firmly on these early works.

Relationships with Women

Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s tumultuous relationships with women proved essential influences on their lives and fiction.

For Hemingway, women tended to play secondary roles in both his personal and literary spheres. He married four times, had several affairs, and was known for female companionship while on adventures. However, his fiction focuses more on male camaraderie and women serve as romantic interests rather than fully realized characters.

In contrast, Fitzgerald’s tempestuous marriage to Southern belle Zelda Sayre played a central role in his life and work. Zelda served as his muse and their marriage represented the glamour and hedonism of Jazz Age couples. However, her mental health struggles and institutionalization also signaled the couple’s declining fortunes. Fitzgerald drew heavily on Zelda as inspiration for free-spirited female characters like Daisy Buchanan.

While Hemingway kept women largely marginal in his writing, Fitzgerald placed Zelda and idealized versions of her at the heart of works like The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night. Both authors’ rocky personal lives fed their fiction.

Later Careers and Deaths

By the 1930s, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald struggled to maintain their early fame and creativity.

Hemingway produced several more novels including the Spanish Civil War tale For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, becoming only the second American author so honored after Sinclair Lewis. However, Hemingway struggled with depression, alcoholism, and deteriorating health in his later years before taking his own life in 1961.

Fitzgerald failed to ever fully complete another novel after The Great Gatsby, hampered by Zelda’s institutionalization and his own alcoholism and declining commercial success. He worked as a Hollywood scriptwriter to pay debts but died suddenly of a heart attack in 1940 at age 44. His unfinished final work, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1941.

Fitzgerald’s early death cemented his image as an emblem of Jazz Age youth, talent, and burnout. Hemingway remains America’s most famous “man’s man” author and winner of high literary honors. Both left behind iconic novels and short stories from the 1920s that changed American literature.