Sometimes characterized as the most significant author since Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway was an acknowledged master of the short story, with his groundbreaking style and its apparent simplicity and honesty changing the nature of English prose fiction. While in the early 1920s some mainstream editors seemed baffled by their subtlety, today his stories are mainstays in the classroom, taught at all levels from secondary school through university graduate courses.

How can we convince readers, and especially students, to slow down to the crawl that is often necessary to see the real power in the compressed language Hemingway uses to tell a story? Are there qualities of digital age life that make students, somehow, more connected to Hemingway’s life and his writing? How can we compare the 21st-century “transhumanist” interest in making ourselves into “something more than merely human” with Hemingway’s characters like Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Catherine Barkley, Pilar, Robert Jordan, or Santiago, all of whom similarly wrestle within the bounds of their own mortality? Laura Godfrey has assembled a group of scholars who speak eloquently to these questions.

Teaching Hemingway and Race provides a practicable means for teaching the subject of race in Hemingway’s writing and related texts—from how to approach ethnic, nonwhite international, and tribal characters to how to teach difficult questions of racial representation. Rather than suggesting that Hemingway’s portrayals of cultural otherness are incidental to teaching and reading the texts, the volume brings them to the fore.

Ernest Hemingway is a writer we often associate with particular places and animals; Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Spain’s countryside, East Africa’s game reserves, Cuba’s blue water, and Idaho’s sagebrush all come to mind. We can easily visualize the iconic images of Hemingway with fly rod bent by hefty trout, with bulls charging matadors, or of the famous author proudly posing with trophy lions, marlin, and a menagerie of Western American game animals.

Ernest Hemingway’s place in American letters seems guaranteed: a winner of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, Hemingway has long been a fixture in high school and college curricula. Just as influential as his famed economy of style and unflappable heroes, however, is his public persona. Hemingway helped create an image of a masculine ideal: sportsman, brawler, hard drinker, serial monogamist, and world traveler. Yet his iconicity has also worked against him. Because Hemingway is often dismissed by students and scholars alike for his perceived misogyny, instructors might find themselves wondering how to handle the impossibly over-determined author or even if they should include him on their syllabi at all.

“I’ve been teaching Hemingway for more than two decades, and I can honestly say that this book will change the way that I introduce his work to my students.” —Stephen Trout, University of South Alabama

Teaching Hemingway and Modernism presents concrete, intertextual models for using Hemingway’s work effectively in various classroom settings, so students can understand the pertinent works, definitions, and types of avant-gardism that inflected his art. The fifteen teacher-scholars whose essays are included in the volume offer approaches that combine a focused individual treatment of Hemingway’s writing with clear links to the modernist era and offer meaningful assignments, prompts, and teaching tools.