Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's groundbreaking prose style and examination of timeless themes made him one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. Yet in Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action, Mark Cirino observes, "Literary criticism has accused Hemingway of many things but thinking too deeply is not one of them." Although much has been written about the author's love of action-hunting, fishing, drinking, bullfighting, boxing, travel, and the moveable feast-Cirino looks at Hemingway's focus on the modern mind, paralleling the interest in conscioucness of such predecessors and contemporaries as Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Henry James. Hemmingway, Cirino demonstrates, probes the ways his character's minds respond when placed in urgent situations or when damaged by past traumas. In Cirino's analysis of Hemingway's work through this lens-examining such celebrated classics as A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, and "Big Two-Hearted River" and less appreciated works including Islands in the Streamand "Because I Think Deeper"-an entirely different Hemingway hero emerges: intelligent, introspective, and ruminative.

Mark Cirino is assistant professor of English at the University of Evansville. He is the co-editor of Ernest Hemingway: Geography of Memory and the general editor of Kent State University Press's "Reading Hemingway" series. He is also the author of two novels, Name the Baby and Arizona Blues.