The Influence of Spanish Writers on Hemingway

This essay explores the important but obscured influence of Spanish noventayochistas on the development of Hemingway’s distinctive style. Born between 1850 and 1883, the noventayochistas revitalized the Spanish language through thematic and stylistic innovations preceding much of what made Hemingway famous a generation later. Had Hemingway never been to Spain, he may not have mastered the combination of short sentences, terse language, clarity, impressionist attention to landscape, poetry hidden in prose, extensive dialogue, and a search for “truth” defined as what one feels, not what one is supposed to feel, in stories of toreo, anarchists and big-game fishermen, linked by an ancient, stoic code of honor