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Hemingway built a prose style out of subtraction — short declarative sentences, almost no adverbs, emotion communicated through what’s left unsaid rather than described. He called it the ‘iceberg theory’: the reader should feel the weight of everything the writer knows and chooses not to state. That style, and the outsized life he lived to go with it, made him one of the most imitated writers of the 20th century.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Modernist Fiction · Updated August 2026
Modernist FictionOn my shelf
The Sun Also Rises
A group of disillusioned American and British expatriates drift from the cafes of Paris to the bullfights of Pamplona, unable to settle into anything resembling purpose after the First World War. Hemingway’s first novel and the definitive portrait of the ‘Lost Generation.’
The emotional core is Jake Barnes’s war injury and his unresolved love for Brett Ashley — Hemingway never states the wound directly, which is the clearest early demonstration of the iceberg method.
War Fiction
A Farewell to Arms
An American ambulance officer serving in the Italian army during World War I falls in love with an English nurse, against a backdrop of retreat, desertion, and the war’s slow destruction of any illusion that it means something.
Drawn partly from Hemingway’s own wartime experience and injury in Italy. The ending is one of the most deliberately flat, unsentimental conclusions in war fiction, and it’s meant to be.
War Fiction
For Whom the Bell Tolls
An American volunteer fighting with anti-fascist guerrillas during the Spanish Civil War is tasked with blowing up a bridge behind enemy lines, and falls in love with a young Spanish woman in the days before the mission.
Hemingway’s most political novel, written from direct experience covering the Spanish Civil War as a journalist. It shares its setting and moment with Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, told from the opposite side of the ideological argument that consumed the war.
Novella
The Old Man and the Sea
An aging Cuban fisherman battles a giant marlin far out at sea, alone, over days, in a struggle that costs him almost everything the fish is worth. Won the Pulitzer Prize and was cited directly in his 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The shortest and most stripped-down of his major works — a pure demonstration of the iceberg method applied to a story with almost no plot beyond the struggle itself.
Memoir
A Moveable Feast
A posthumously published memoir of Hemingway’s years as a young, poor, unpublished writer in 1920s Paris, among Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the wider expatriate literary scene that shaped his early style.
Published after his death from manuscripts he’d been revising, it’s as much myth-making as memoir — but the Paris atmosphere and the portrait of a broke, hungry, ambitious young writer are genuinely vivid.
