SOURCE: Lamb, Robert Paul. “Hemingway and the Creation of Twentieth-Century Dialogue.” Twentieth Century Literature 42, no. 4 (winter 1996): 453-80.

In the following essay, Lamb analyzes the dialogue in “Indian Camp,” “A Canary for One," and “Hills Like White Elephants.”

[W]hile one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives, one can, as artist, choose one's “ancestors.” … Hemingway [was] an “ancestor.”

—Ralph Ellison (140)

In July 1961, the Saturday Review devoted a special memorial issue to Ernest Hemingway, in which writers and critics from around the world paid tribute to the recently deceased author and attempted to assess his impact on their own national literatures. Although the Hemingway mystique was given heavy emphasis, many contributors also spoke to his artistic influence. The exiled Spanish political philosopher Salvador de Madariage observed that “Hemingway's manner of writing, his direct, simple, yet forceful prose” had “exerted an undoubted influence on the new generation of Spanish novelists...