Kazin on Hemingway

 

It may be that all we really have and know is our consciousness, that the alternative is something we know nothing about, that the livingness of being alive is the inescapable drama of our existence. Not many writers have incarnated this in their work, have emphasized the angle of their particular consciousness so that our experience of their work becomes as elemental as their own grasp of existence. To read Hemingway was always to feel more alive.

                                            ~ An American Procession, 360.