Hear Hemingway Read Hemingway, and Faulkner Read Faulkner (90 Minutes of Classic Audio)

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Hem­ing­way and Faulkn­er, Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way…. The Amer­i­can lit­er­ary canon has expand­ed so much in the past thir­ty years or so that it almost spans the globe, like Amer­i­can busi­ness, draw­ing in writ­ers from every pos­si­ble cor­ner. With greater inclu­sion comes the pass­ing out of fash­ion of many a for­mer icon (does any­one read Dreis­er or Dos Pas­sos any­more?). And yet, no mat­ter how much crit­i­cal tastes and schol­ar­ly mea­sures change, it seems we’ll nev­er be able to do with­out our Hem­ing­way and Faulkn­er.

Per­haps it’s their deep takes on history—Hemingway’s sen­ti­men­tal war cor­re­spon­dence and trag­ic sense of a chang­ing Europe; Faulkner’s sense of a South held in thrall to squalid delu­sions of grandeur and epic colo­nial vio­lence. Geopo­lit­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant they still may be, but there’s much more to both than geopol­i­tics. Per­haps it’s the time­less styl­is­tic dialec­tic, or the Nobels, or the trad­ed insults, or that the names them­selves, like Roo­sevelt and Kennedy, trig­ger instant recall of the “Amer­i­can cen­tu­ry.” Of course, devo­tees of Faulkn­er (I am one), of Hem­ing­way, or of Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way need no ratio­nale, and it is to such peo­ple prin­ci­pal­ly that today’s post is addressed.

For today, we bring you Hem­ing­way and Faulkn­er, read­ing Hem­ing­way and Faulkn­er. In the Spo­ti­fy playlists above (down­load Spo­ti­fy here), we have both authors read­ing from their Nobel accep­tance speech­es, then excerpts from their lit­er­ary works. These record­ings were orig­i­nal­ly released as vinyl albums by Caed­mon Records, that pre-audio­book phe­nom­e­non found­ed by Bar­bara Holdridge and Mar­i­anne Roney in 1952. Caed­mon released albums of read­ings by dozens of major writ­ers, like Dylan Thomas and Eudo­ra Wel­ty, and we have fea­tured many of them here before—such as those from T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden, and Ten­nessee Williams (read­ing Hart Crane). But today, it’s Hem­ing­way and Faulkn­er, who despite—or because of—their dif­fer­ences, belong togeth­er for­ev­er as great Amer­i­can lit­er­ary patri­archs, even if patri­archy is ter­mi­nal­ly passé.

If you need the Spo­ti­fy soft­ware, please down­load it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

William Faulkner’s Review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

18 (Free) Books Ernest Hem­ing­way Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time

Rare Audio: William Faulkn­er Names His Best Nov­el, And the First Faulkn­er Nov­el You Should Read

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness