Reading List

Authors Like Ernest Hemingway

At eighteen Hemingway was handing out chocolate and cigarettes to Italian soldiers when a mortar shell landed near him at Fossalta, putting more than two hundred fragments in his legs. Before that he had spent six months as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star, whose style sheet told him to use short sentences, short first paragraphs and vigorous English. Between them, those two things produced the most imitated prose in the language. His theory of it, set out in Death in the Afternoon, is that a writer may leave out anything he genuinely knows and the reader will feel it anyway — the dignity of an iceberg is that seven-eighths of it is underwater. The Sun Also Rises (1926) came out of Paris and Pamplona, A Farewell to Arms (1929) out of the wound, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) out of Spain, and The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won the Pulitzer Prize and helped secure the Nobel two years later. The short stories are better than the novels. He married four times, lived in Paris, Key West and Cuba, and died in 1961. The ten below are chosen on the sentence, the omission and the pose.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · American fiction · The iceberg theory · Nobel Prize 1954 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

For the sentence, the closest matches are Raymond Carver and Cormac McCarthy, with Denis Johnson and Joan Didion carrying it somewhere stranger. Mark Twain is the ancestor Hemingway named himself, Gertrude Stein taught him in Paris and F. Scott Fitzgerald edited him there. Graham Greene and Tobias Wolff are the moral and the modern versions. And his third wife was the better reporter.

Every book by Ernest Hemingway →

Where to start if you loved Ernest Hemingway

If you want the sentence, read Raymond Carver.

Cathedral. The same method, in small American towns running out of money.

If you want the ancestor he named, read Mark Twain.

Huckleberry Finn. The book he said all modern American literature comes from.

If you want it with a conscience, read Graham Greene.

The Quiet American. Saigon, an idealist, and under two hundred pages.

If you want the best of the inheritors, read Denis Johnson.

Train Dreams. One labourer, the early West, and an evening of your time.

If you want the argument against him, read Martha Gellhorn.

The Face of War. Sixty years of reporting by the wife who out-reported him.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

10 authors like Ernest Hemingway

01
The sentence, inherited · Closest match

Raymond Carver

American · What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983)

Carver wrote short stories about people in small American towns running out of money, marriage and sobriety, in sentences so bare that the genre acquired a name, minimalism, which he disliked. His editor Gordon Lish cut the early collections drastically — in some cases by half, changing endings entirely — and the restored versions published later as Beginners show a warmer, wordier writer underneath. He died at fifty.

The most direct inheritance of the method: say less, trust the reader, let the important thing sit under the surface unstated. Both write men who cannot say what is wrong and both get their effects from what is missing. The Lish story also raises Hemingway's own question in a sharp form — how much of that famous spareness is the writer and how much is the editing. Read Cathedral, the title story.

— Lisanne
02
Older than the genre · The ancestor he named

Mark Twain

American · Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Life on the Mississippi (1883)

Huckleberry Finn is a boy and an escaped enslaved man on a raft going down the Mississippi, narrated by the boy in his own spoken idiom rather than in literary English — which had not really been done before. Twain wrote it over seven years, abandoned it twice, and it has been argued over, banned and taught continuously since. He also wrote travel books, journalism and a great deal about American self-deception.

Hemingway named it directly: all modern American literature, he wrote in Green Hills of Africa, comes from this one book, and there was nothing before and nothing as good since. The debt is the voice — ordinary American speech doing the work of literary prose — which is the foundation everything on this page is built on. Read it and you can hear the whole century starting.

— Lisanne
03
His teacher in Paris

Gertrude Stein

American · Three Lives (1909), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

Stein moved to Paris in 1903, filled her apartment with Picassos and Matisses before either was famous, and wrote prose built on repetition, present tense and the removal of ordinary syntax. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is her own memoir written in her partner's voice, and it is very funny. She read Hemingway's early work, told him to start over, and gave the phrase lost generation to his epigraph.

The person who taught him to cut. Stein's own experiments are far stranger than anything he wrote — she is closer to Cubism than to the novel — but the principle he took from her is the one that made him: repetition as rhythm, and a plain vocabulary used with absolute deliberation. They later fell out and wrote unkindly about each other. Read Three Lives, or the Autobiography for pleasure.

— Lisanne
04
The friend and rival

F. Scott Fitzgerald

American · The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934)

The Great Gatsby is a hundred and eighty pages about a man who reinvents himself entirely in order to win back a woman, narrated by a neighbour who half admires and half despises everyone in it. Fitzgerald was the more famous of the two in the 1920s and the more comprehensively forgotten by the time he died in 1940 at forty-four; the reputation was rebuilt after the war.

The other half of the Paris story, and the friendship is one of the best documented in American letters — Fitzgerald read The Sun Also Rises in draft and told Hemingway to cut the first chapters, which he did. They are opposites on the sentence: Fitzgerald is lyrical, adjectival and openly romantic where Hemingway strips. Hemingway's account of him in A Moveable Feast is unkind and worth reading afterwards, not before.

— Lisanne

Every book by F. Scott Fitzgerald →

Authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald →

05
The moral version

Graham Greene

British · The Quiet American (1955), The Power and the Glory (1940)

Greene wrote spare, fast novels set wherever the twentieth century was going wrong: a whisky priest hunted through revolutionary Mexico, a British journalist in Saigon watching an idealistic American cause a massacre, a burnt-out architect in a Congolese leper colony. He worked for British intelligence, travelled constantly as a reporter, and divided his own books into novels and entertainments.

What the Hemingway sentence looks like with a conscience attached. Greene has the same economy, the same foreign correspondent's eye for a bar and a border post, and the same interest in men who are being tested — but where Hemingway asks whether a man behaves well, Greene asks whether behaving well is even available. The Quiet American is the one to read, and it is under two hundred pages.

— Lisanne

Every book by Graham Greene →

06
The prose, learned by typing

Joan Didion

American · Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979)

Didion reported 1960s California in sentences shorter and colder than anyone else's, wrote screenplays with her husband, and late in life produced The Year of Magical Thinking about his death, which won the National Book Award. She has described typing out Hemingway's sentences as a teenager in order to learn how they worked, and returned to the opening of A Farewell to Arms repeatedly in her essays.

The clearest case of the influence being consciously acquired rather than absorbed. The famous Didion effect — the flat declarative, the significant detail placed without comment, the refusal to tell you how to feel — is the iceberg theory applied to journalism. She is better than he is on the sentence at this point, which he would have hated. Read the first essay in The White Album.

— Lisanne
Every book by Joan Didion →

Authors like Joan Didion →

07
The sentence, pushed to scripture

Cormac McCarthy

American · Blood Meridian (1985), No Country for Old Men (2005), The Road (2006)

McCarthy wrote twelve novels of the American West and South in prose without quotation marks or semicolons, built on short declaratives and long biblical accumulations. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize and the Coen brothers' film of No Country for Old Men took four Academy Awards. He died in 2023; a disclosure about his private life published afterwards is covered on his own page here.

Hemingway's principles carried to an extreme he would not have recognised. The same refusal of ornament and psychological explanation, the same landscape treated as fact rather than mood — and then a metaphysical ambition Hemingway never attempted. Read No Country for Old Men if you want the closest thing to Hemingway's pacing, and Blood Meridian if you want to see where the method can go.

— Lisanne
Every book by Cormac McCarthy →

Authors like Cormac McCarthy →

08
The sentence, made strange

Denis Johnson

American · Jesus' Son (1992), Train Dreams (2011)

Jesus' Son is eleven linked stories narrated by an addict whose grip on chronology is unreliable and whose sentences keep arriving somewhere unexpectedly beautiful. Train Dreams is a hundred-odd pages about a day labourer in the early twentieth-century American West. Tree of Smoke, a long novel about American intelligence in Vietnam, won the National Book Award in 2007. He died in 2017.

The best of the inheritors, because he does not merely copy the economy — he breaks it. A Johnson sentence starts as plain American reportage and then swerves into something hallucinatory in the last four words. If you love the Nick Adams stories and want that world written by someone who has also read the twentieth century, Train Dreams takes an evening.

— Lisanne
09
The modern American memoirist

Tobias Wolff

American · This Boy's Life (1989), In Pharaoh's Army (1994), Old School (2003)

Wolff wrote the memoir of a childhood spent moving west with his mother and inventing a version of himself that might escape it, filmed in 1993 with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro; In Pharaoh's Army covers Vietnam. Old School is a novel about a scholarship boy at a prep school where visiting writers — including Hemingway — judge a student writing competition. He introduced the Hemingway story collection that accompanied the Burns documentary.

The living American writer who has thought hardest about what Hemingway did and what it costs to imitate him. Old School is partly about exactly that: a boy trying to write like his heroes and discovering that a borrowed voice is a kind of lie. Wolff has the economy without the pose. Read This Boy's Life, then Old School.

— Lisanne
10
The argument against him

Martha Gellhorn

American · The Face of War (1959), A Stricken Field (1940)

Gellhorn reported war for sixty years — Spain, Finland, China, Dachau, Vietnam, the Six-Day War, Panama at eighty-one — and her method was to leave the generals alone and write what the war did to the people living in it. She was married to Hemingway from 1940 to 1945. When he took her press accreditation for the Normandy landings, she stowed away on a hospital ship, went ashore as a stretcher bearer and filed; she was one of the only reporters on the beach that day and he was not. She spent the rest of her life refusing to be interviewed about him.

The sharpest correction to the legend, and she was in the room. The charge against Hemingway has always been the pose — the bullfights, the big game, the performed courage, and the women in the novels who are either saints or trouble. Gellhorn did the thing he wrote about, better and for longer, without any of it. Read The Face of War and then reread For Whom the Bell Tolls.

— Lisanne

Frequently asked questions about authors like Ernest Hemingway

Who should I read if I love Hemingway?

Raymond Carver is the closest on the sentence, with Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy taking the same economy somewhere stranger and Joan Didion applying it to journalism. Mark Twain is the ancestor Hemingway named himself, Gertrude Stein taught him to cut and F. Scott Fitzgerald edited him in Paris. Graham Greene writes the same spare foreign-correspondent novel with a conscience attached, and Tobias Wolff is the modern American who has thought hardest about the cost of imitating him. Martha Gellhorn is the argument against.

Which Hemingway should I start with?

The short stories, not the novels. “Hills Like White Elephants”, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, “Big Two-Hearted River” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” are where the method is at full strength and they take minutes each. Then The Sun Also Rises (1926), which is the best of the novels. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is a hundred pages and the one most people are given at school. A Moveable Feast, the posthumous Paris memoir, is the most purely enjoyable thing he wrote.

What is the iceberg theory?

His own name for the method, set out in Death in the Afternoon (1932): a writer who knows his subject properly may leave out most of it, and the reader will feel the omitted part as strongly as if it had been written. The dignity of an iceberg, he wrote, comes from only one-eighth of it being above water. In practice it means the crucial thing — the abortion in “Hills Like White Elephants”, the war in “Big Two-Hearted River” — is never named. It only works if the writer does actually know it, which is the part imitators skip.

What is the criticism of Hemingway?

The pose, and the women. The bullfighting, the big-game hunting and the performed toughness look to many readers like a costume, and the female characters in the novels tend to be either idealised or a problem for the hero — Brett Ashley and Maria have both been argued over for decades. The prose, imitated badly for a century, has also made the original harder to read fresh. The defence is the short stories, which are supple, often funny, and far less certain than the legend.

Is the Ken Burns documentary worth watching?

Yes, and it is the best single introduction. Hemingway, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is three parts and about six hours, first shown on PBS in April 2021, with Jeff Daniels reading Hemingway and Meryl Streep, Mary-Louise Parker, Patricia Clarkson and Keri Russell voicing the four wives. It draws on the archive at the John F. Kennedy Library and does not protect him: the drinking, the cruelty and the myth-making are all in it. Scribner published a tie-in story collection introduced by Tobias Wolff.

Did Gertrude Stein really teach him?

She read his early work in Paris in the early 1920s, told him a good deal of it was not writing, and pushed him toward the repetition and plainness that became his signature; she also gave him the phrase lost generation, which he used as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises. They fell out later and were unkind about each other in print — her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is dismissive of him, and his A Moveable Feast returns the favour with interest.

What order should I read his books in?

Stories first, then The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Save A Moveable Feast (1964) until you know the Paris cast, because half its pleasure is the score-settling. Death in the Afternoon is about bullfighting and contains the iceberg passage; Green Hills of Africa is about hunting and contains the line about Twain. The posthumous novels are for completists.

Who was Martha Gellhorn?

One of the great war correspondents of the twentieth century, who reported the Spanish Civil War, the fall of Czechoslovakia, the Winter War, D-Day, the liberation of Dachau, Vietnam and conflicts into her eighties. She was Hemingway's third wife, from 1940 to 1945, and the marriage ended substantially because she refused to stop working. When he obtained the press accreditation for the Normandy landings that she was denied, she crossed on a hospital ship and went ashore as a stretcher bearer. She detested being asked about him.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“All you have to do is write one true sentence.”

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964.

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