Mario Taboada wrote:
<<It's hard to determine whether Hemingway influenced
Hammett first or viceversa. They came of literary age around
the same time....>>
Exactly. Hemingway's style was certainly set by the time he
published the full-length version of IN OUR TIME in 1925,
which is a couple of years before Hammett's $106,000 BLOOD
MONEY appeared. Hemingway's first (and best) novel THE SUN
ALSO RISES appeared in 1926, three years before the DAIN
CURSE and RED HARVEST. I recently read some of Hemingway's
journalism for the KANSAS CITY STAR (written in 1917, when he
was still a teenager) and some rudiments of hard-boiled style
and subject matter appear there. So I think it's safe to say
that Hammett had no influence on Hemingway's first published
works and no influence on his much-ballyhooed style. It is
possible Hammett was reading Hemingway when Hammett was
working on his first published works, but I think that
Hammett most likely reached his style independently. I think
it IS interesting that they both hit upon a similar approach
to narrative and dialogue at about the same time. I suspect
they were responding to the same influences: the advent of a
tight, standardized newspaper style; the "cablese" of foreign
dispatches; the "style" used in telegrams; the clipped
language of print advertisements of the day; and so on. There
were plenty of examples at the time for them to draw from to
reach that kind of "less is more" approach.
Later...Kip
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