Saul Escalona asked David B. Lentz:

David, I read you review of "The Sun Also Rises ' of H. Hemingway and I found very interesting so I search for this author in Goodreads and went through his books and its ratings numbers. Beside "The old man and the Sea", it looks like that Hemingway is little read by the USA public although being a noble prize and a much renounced author. Any explanation why ?

David B. Lentz Dear Saul, thank you for your intriguing question about Hemingway. At the height of his career he sold as many as half a million copies of his novels in one year. He pioneered stylistically in the use of dialogue by writing as people actually spoke to each other. He believed in writing one true sentence after another and so his simple syntax is uncommonly powerful and immersive to read. His views on women reflect the macho bias of his era and although many of his women are strong and heroic, his sentiments on women as sex objects and in some cases in stereotyping American minorities fall short of depicting them as well-rounded characters. He adored Cubanos and lionized Spanish bullfighters but on the whole we may expect more humanity in the characters inhabiting the novels of our Nobel Prize winners in literature. Nonetheless, Hemingway fascinates by virtue of his robust lifestyle and his more mature fiction after "The Sun Also Rises." For example, in my view "The Old Man and the Sea", "A Farewell to Arms" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" are all true literary masterpieces. My new novel publishing in January of 2016, "The Fine Art of Grace," offers a chapter about Hemingway in Key West where he soberly instigates a bare-knuckled, boxing match with Nobel Prize winning poet, Wallace Stevens, after the drunken poet made disparaging remarks about the novelist to Hem's sister at a cocktail party in Key West. In the Pantheon of American Novelists Hemingway's immortality is certainly assured.

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