American man: The ambitious searches of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway

Michael Kwame Forbes, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative examination of how certain works by Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright jointly address themes concerning manhood, violence, and alienation. The dissertation considers how each American writer's treatment of common themes is effected by race and the social climates they come out of: the American Midwest during and after the World War I era and the American South after The Great Depression. An important dimension of this study is how each man traveled to identical geographical settings-Spain, Africa, and France and responded to globally significant events taking place there such as The Spanish Civil War and independence coming to Anglo-Africa after World War II. The shared subject here is the affects of modernity on traditional culture. Their debut collection of short stories in the mid 20's to late 30's on through to their nonfiction journals on Anglo-Africa in the early 1950's shows a developing struggle, in each writer, with detached individualism and offering political analysis and commentary.

Recommended Citation

Michael Kwame Forbes, "American man: The ambitious searches of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway" (January 1, 2007). Electronic Doctoral Dissertations for UMass Amherst. Paper AAI3275780.
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3275780