ABSTRACT
A vast number of literary critics have deemed Ernest Hemingway a nihilist. As an individual, they contend, Hemingway spurned religious truth and espoused absurdist nihilism. Many of these same literary critics have also long maintained that Hemingway’s fi ction expresses equally the thoroughgoing nihilism and rejection of religious claims they see as defi ning the writer’s own values: The art and the artist express the same worldview. Noted critic Alan Lebowitz, for example, asserts that Hemingway gives readers but “one single, simple truth . . . that life is harsh and dull . . . and that man, under sentence of annihilation, is while he lives only a human punching bag” (quoted in Donaldson 1977, 232).” Scott Donaldson in his classic biography maintains similarly that Hemingway, in his most philosophical of moments, recognizes “only a universe stripped of meaning” (Donaldson 1977, 233). In a later biography Kenneth Lynn reiterates the traditional assessment: In Hemingway’s world, “human life is hopeless” (Lynn 1987, 114, 317). Echoing such a sentiment many biographers have maintained for decades that Hemingway’s life and art spurn religious values. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers among many others holds without equivocation that both Hemingway’s personal thought and his literary output “are consistently skeptical about religion” (quoted in Stoneback 1991, 111).
