IN GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA, the first-person narrator says that Crane “was dying from the start” (23). In a way, so was Ernest Hemingway, whose fiction betrays what Frank Scafella described, without exaggeration, as an “extreme anxiety of death” (5). Not surprisingly, there has been a great deal written on the subject, much of it having to do with Hemingway’s love of the corrida and most of it harking back to Phillip Young’s interpretation of a famous Hemingway phrase: “grace under pressure” (Ernest Hemingway, 7–9, 14). Young saw the emergence of a “code hero” very early in Hemingway’s fiction, a hero whose message “is life: you lose, of course; what counts is how you conduct yourself while you are being destroyed” (8). For decades, critics subscribed to Young’s argument that Hemingway’s famous World War I wounding was the source of his alleged ambivalence toward death and the irresistible urge to confront it.

It’s worth remembering, however, that Hemingway was traumatized by death even before, as a nineteen year old, he was felled by a trench mortar and machine-gun fire in Italy. As biographer Kenneth Lynn observes, Hemingway’s early boyhood was haunted by death “for reasons that he could not bring himself to discuss with anyone” (22). This avoidance persisted throughout his life. Valerie (Danby-Smith) Hemingway, who became his friend and secretary in 1959, writes that Hemingway often voiced his fears to her but never talked about death (132). According to Idaho hunting companion Forrest MacMullen, Hemingway broached the subject only obliquely, in a manner that could be construed as colorful behavior or jesting: he used to bark at the mention of death. “He’d say, ‘Woof woof,’” MacMullen recalled, “more or less acknowledging that he heard it. The first time that I was around him and death was mentioned and he said ‘Woof woof,’ I asked him about it. And he said, ‘It’s an unpleasant thing’” (Plath and Simons, 129).

Unable to talk about death to his friends, Hemingway filled his writing with it.

Shortly before fame first came to John Updike in 1968 - his impish face celebrated on the cover of Time as the author of that sensational wife-swapping novel, Couples - the 35-year-old was asked by the Paris Review if he considered himself part of an American literary tradition. Pressed further to comment on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James, Updike responded, tellingly, “I love Melville and like James, but I tend to learn more from Europeans because I think they have strengths that reach back past Puritanism.”

By avoiding mention of Hawthorne, yet referring to that rigid religion associated as much with the author of The Scarlet Letter (1850) as with New England itself, Updike could not have been more in denial than if he had climbed upon Reverend Dimmesdale's midnight scaffold. That is ironic, considering all that we know, now, of Updike's longstanding fascination with the first American author to write a novel that Henry James proclaimed worthy of export, “as exquisite in quality as anything that had been received” from Europe. While the young Updike clearly felt it premature to allow himself to be linked to Hawthorne and an American literary tradition, an older Updike more at ease with the notion would simply say that “one would love even to aspire to be as good as Hawthorne.” He may have learned more from Europeans, but Updike did not hesitate to embrace Hawthorne later as an influence, even on Couples, which he described as being consciously set in “Hawthorne's territory,” a novel as much “about New England and the Puritan faith” as it was about marital infidelity in the early 1960s.