Autopathography and Depression: Describing the Despair Beyond Despair

Examines how Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Styron wrote about their depression as a way of understanding it. Positing that Hemingway filled his fiction with characters suffering from psychiatric conditions and alcoholism much like his own, Moran argues that Hemingway’s metaphor of illness as a “generation’s outlook” allowed him to deny the personal relevance of his psychiatric disorders. Reads the husband’s situation in “Indian Camp” as a metaphor for profound depression. Comments briefly on alcoholism and suicide in The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, To Have and Have Not, and “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.