New Book Reconciles the Creative Writer’s Focus on Art with the Critic’s Focus on Cultural Studies

“Reading The Hemingway Short Story is like attending a master class on literary craft; an expert scholar-critic reveals the subtle methods and moves that produce the distinctive, memorable effects that comprise Hemingway’s literary signature.”—J. Gerald Kennedy, coeditor of French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad

In The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers, Robert Paul Lamb delivers a dazzling analysis of the craft of this influential writer. Lamb scrutinizes a selection of Hemingway’s exemplary stories to illuminate the author’s methods of construction and to show how craft criticism complements and enhances cultural literary studies. The Hemingway Short Story, the highly anticipated sequel to Lamb’s critically acclaimed Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story, reconciles the creative writer’s focus on art with the concerns of cultural critics, establishing the value that craft criticism holds for all readers.

Beautifully written in clear and engaging prose, Lamb’s study presents close readings of representative Hemingway stories such as “Soldier’s Home,” “A Canary for One,” “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” and “Big Two-Hearted River.” Lamb’s examination of “Indian Camp,” for instance, explores not only its biographical contexts—showing how details, incidents, and characters developed in the writer’s mind and notebook as he transmuted life into art—but also its original, deleted opening and the final text of the story, uncovering otherwise unseen aspects of technique and new terrains of meaning. Lamb proves that a writer is not merely a site upon which cultural forces contend, but a professional in his or her craft who makes countless conscious decisions in creating a literary text.

Robert Paul Lamb received his doctorate in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University. He is author of Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story and coeditor of A Companion to American Fiction, 1865–1914. He was named the 2008 Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation.

January 2013
256 pages, 6 x 9
978-0-8071-4742-9
Cloth $45.00