[csense]

Why do people want to emulate Hemingway's style?

He's an awful writer. I couldn't stomach his writing style long enough to finish A Farewell to Arms when I was supposed to read it in high school.

If his work wasn't in a book that was professionally printed and bound, I'd have mistaken it for the scribblings of some amateur hack -- maybe one of the students who didn't make it into AP English, because the writing quality was kinda mediocre-to-poor.

Dickens, OTOH, is a master of language -- creating long and complex sentences, filled of description and analogy, which have a rich diversity of adjectives and adverbs, creating a descriptive, witty prose.

I've never understood why people like Hemingway.

[pewallin]

Well, he is widely regarded as one of the best writers of all time and among other things won the Nobel prize in literature http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/.... Don't mistake brevity for simplicity. Btw, If you are just starting out I highly recommend The Sun Also Rises.

[acqq]

Have you ever thought about the possibility that the Nobel prizes aren't always fully rational or narrowly focused and that there are different motives involved? Hemingway had the novels that widely resonated. Sometimes the writing style or technical details aren't too important when you consider the work as the whole.