The Torrents of Spring and the Beginning of the Hemingway Myth

Although most scholars consider Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novella The Torrents of Spring as an aberration in the Hemingway canon, contemporary readers should rethink its marginalized standing as it is the first work in which the author intentionally broke with his literary influences that changed critical conversations about his future output. While Hemingway claimed to have written the book in order to cancel his contract with Boni & Liveright, he also used it to criticize such writers as Henry James, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, and Willa Cather, demystifying them in order to mystify himself as an artist working in a new minimalist, confrontational prose style that opposed theirs. Through such actions, he established a pattern of behavior that revitalized his fiction by establishing a personal mythos that critics continued to perpetuate throughout his career.