A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway is an American author who heavily influenced 20th century fiction. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the Nobel Prize in literature, he popularized a method of writing which he termed the iceberg theory. The beginnings of this theory can be seen in A Moveable Feast in Hemingway’s discussion of omission. His early work as a journalist forced Hemingway to only report on what was immediately occurring, with little context as to the meaning of these events. Pulling from his journalistic endeavors, Hemingway applied this same logic to short stories, knowingly omitting certain elements yet allowing them to undergird the plot and the motivations of characters. In this way, Hemingway argues, the reader knows these omitted elements with more truth and understanding than if they were explicitly stated. In A Moveable Feast, we see Hemingway experiment with this tactic numerous times, such as when he and Evan Shipman speculate where the opium jar went and when Hemingway overhears an argument in Gertrude Stein’s apartment with no prior context. Over the course of his literary career, which spanned from the 1920s-1950s, Hemingway would publish seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. He is considered a canonical author of American literature.