Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, the two big dogs in the Amer­i­can lit­er­ary scene were William Faulkn­er and Ernest Hem­ing­way. Both were inter­na­tion­al­ly revered, both were mas­ters of the nov­el and the short sto­ry, and both won Nobel Prizes.

Born in Mis­sis­sip­pi, Faulkn­er wrote alle­gor­i­cal his­to­ries of the South in a style that is both ellip­ti­cal and chal­leng­ing. His works were marked by uses of stream-of-con­scious­ness and shift­ing points of view. He also favored titan­i­cal­ly long sen­tences, hold­ing the record for hav­ing, accord­ing to the Guin­ness Book of Records, the longest sen­tence in lit­er­a­ture. Open your copy of Absa­lom! Absa­lom! to chap­ter 6 and you’ll find it. Hem­ing­way, on the oth­er hand, famous­ly sand­blast­ed the florid prose of Vic­to­ri­an-era books into short, terse, decep­tive­ly sim­ple sen­tences. His sto­ries were about root­less, dam­aged, cos­mopoli­tan peo­ple in exot­ic loca­tions like Paris or the Serengeti.

If you type in “Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way” in your favorite search engine, you’ll like­ly stum­ble upon this famous exchange — Faulkn­er on Hem­ing­way: “He has nev­er been known to use a word that might send a read­er to the dic­tio­nary.” Hem­ing­way: “Poor Faulkn­er. Does he real­ly think big emo­tions come from big words?” Zing! Faulkn­er report­ed­ly didn’t mean for the line to come off as an insult but Hem­ing­way took it as one. The inci­dent end­ed up being the most acri­mo­nious in the two authors’ com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship.

While Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way nev­er for­mal­ly met, they were reg­u­lar cor­re­spon­dents, and each was keen­ly aware of the other’s tal­ents. And they were com­pet­i­tive with each oth­er, espe­cial­ly Hem­ing­way who was much more inse­cure than you might sur­mise from his macho per­sona. While Hem­ing­way reg­u­lar­ly called Faulkn­er “the best of us all,” mar­veling at his nat­ur­al abil­i­ties, he also ham­mered Faulkn­er for resort­ing to tricks. As he wrote to Har­vey Bre­it, the famed crit­ic for The New York Times, “If you have to write the longest sen­tence in the world to give a book dis­tinc­tion, the next thing you should hire Bill Veek [sic] and use midgets.”

Faulkn­er, on his end, was no less com­pet­i­tive. He once told the New York Her­ald Tri­bune, “I think he’s the best we’ve got.” On the oth­er hand, he bris­tled when an edi­tor men­tioned get­ting Hem­ing­way to write the pref­ace for The Portable Faulkn­er in 1946. “It seems to me in bad taste to ask him to write a pref­ace to my stuff. It’s like ask­ing one race horse in the mid­dle of a race to broad­cast a blurb on anoth­er horse in the same run­ning field.”

When Bre­it asked Faulkn­er to write a review of Hemingway’s 1952 novel­la The Old Man and the Sea, he refused. Yet when a cou­ple months lat­er he got the same request from Wash­ing­ton and Lee University’s lit­er­ary jour­nal, Shenan­doah, Faulkn­er relent­ed, giv­ing guard­ed praise to the nov­el in a one-para­graph-long review. You can read it below.

His best. Time may show it to be the best sin­gle piece of any of us, I mean his and my con­tem­po­raries. This time, he dis­cov­ered God, a Cre­ator. Until now, his men and women had made them­selves, shaped them­selves out of their own clay; their vic­to­ries and defeats were at the hands of each oth­er, just to prove to them­selves or one anoth­er how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about some­thing some­where that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that what­ev­er made and loves and pities Hem­ing­way and me kept him from touch­ing it any fur­ther.

And you can also watch below a fas­ci­nat­ing talk by schol­ar Joseph Frus­cione about how Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way com­pet­ed and influ­enced each oth­er. He wrote the book, Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way: Biog­ra­phy of a Lit­er­ary Rival­ry.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

When William Faulkn­er Set the World Record for Writ­ing the Longest Sen­tence in Lit­er­a­ture: Read the 1,288-Word Sen­tence from Absa­lom, Absa­lom!

The Art of William Faulkn­er: Draw­ings from 1916–1925

Ernest Hem­ing­way Cre­ates a Read­ing List for a Young Writer, 1934

‘Nev­er Be Afraid’: William Faulkner’s Speech to His Daughter’s Grad­u­at­ing Class in 1951

5 Won­der­ful­ly Long Lit­er­ary Sen­tences by Samuel Beck­ett, Vir­ginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzger­ald & Oth­er Mas­ters of the Run-On

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

William Faulkn­er Out­lines on His Office Wall the Plot of His Pulitzer Prize Win­ning Nov­el, A Fable (1954)

Rare 1952 Film: William Faulkn­er on His Native Soil in Oxford, Mis­sis­sip­pi

Jonathan Crow is a  writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

It’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that there was ever a time with­out the word “Kafkaesque.” Yet the term would have meant noth­ing at all to any­one alive at the same time as Franz Kaf­ka — includ­ing, in all prob­a­bil­i­ty, Kaf­ka him­self. Born in Prague in 1883, he grew up under a stern, demand­ing, and per­pet­u­al­ly dis­ap­point­ed father, then made his way through col­lege and entered the work­force. He end­ed up at the Work­ers’ Acci­dent Insur­ance Insti­tute, where he was “sub­ject to long hours, unpaid over­time, mas­sive amounts of paper­work, and absurd, com­plex, bureau­crat­ic sys­tems,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Pur­suit of Won­der video above. But it was dur­ing that same peri­od that he wrote The Tri­al, The Cas­tle, and Ameri­ka.

Of course, Kaf­ka did­n’t actu­al­ly pub­lish those even­tu­al­ly acclaimed books in his life­time. After his death, that task would fall to Max Brod, the writer’s only real friend, and it entailed vio­lat­ing the author’s explic­it­ly stat­ed wish­es. On his deathbed, Kaf­ka “instruct­ed Max Brod to burn all of his unpub­lished man­u­scripts”; instead, Brod “spent the fol­low­ing year or so work­ing to orga­nize and pub­lish his notes and man­u­scripts.” Now that he’s been gone more than a cen­tu­ry, Kafka’s rep­u­ta­tion as one of the great­est lit­er­ary fig­ures of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry is more than secure, and it would take a ded­i­cat­ed con­trar­i­an indeed to argue that Brod did wrong not to toss his papers onto the bon­fire.

Per­haps Kafka’s rep­u­ta­tion would have found a way to grow one way or anoth­er, respond as his writ­ing does to a psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­com­fort we’ve all felt to one degree or anoth­er, in one set­ting or anoth­er: doing our tax­es, wait­ing in air­port secu­ri­ty lines, call­ing tech sup­port. On such occa­sions, we reach for the term “Kafkaesque,” which “tends to refer to the bureau­crat­ic nature of cap­i­tal­is­tic, judi­cia­ry, and gov­ern­ment sys­tems, the sort of com­plex, unclear process­es in which no one indi­vid­ual ever has a com­pre­hen­sive grasp on what is going on, and the sys­tem does­n’t real­ly care.” Typ­i­cal Kaf­ka pro­tag­o­nists are “faced with sud­den, absurd cir­cum­stances. There are no expla­na­tions, and in the end, there is no real chance of over­com­ing them.”

These char­ac­ters are “out­matched by the arbi­trary, sense­less obsta­cles they face, in part because they can’t under­stand or con­trol any of what is hap­pen­ing.” They feel “the unyield­ing desire for answers in con­quest over the exis­ten­tial prob­lems of anx­i­ety, guilt, absur­di­ty, and suf­fer­ing, paired with an inabil­i­ty to ever real­ly under­stand or con­trol the source of the prob­lems and effec­tive­ly over­come them.” Yet “even in the face of absurd, despair­ing cir­cum­stances, Kafka’s char­ac­ters don’t give up. At least ini­tial­ly, they con­tin­ue on and fight against their sit­u­a­tions, try­ing to rea­son, under­stand, or work their way out of the sense­less­ness, but in the end, it is ulti­mate­ly to no avail.” To Kaf­ka, it was all part of anoth­er day in moder­ni­ty. Here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, it seems we may need to start look­ing for an even more pow­er­ful adjec­tive.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Does “Kafkaesque” Real­ly Mean? A Short Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

Under­ground Car­toon­ist Robert Crumb Cre­ates an Illus­trat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

Franz Kaf­ka Ago­nized, Too, Over Writer’s Block: “Tried to Write, Vir­tu­al­ly Use­less;” “Com­plete Stand­still. Unend­ing Tor­ments” (1915)

“Lynchi­an,” “Kubrick­ian,” “Taran­ti­noesque” and 100+ Film Words Have Been Added to the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.