This chapter addresses one of Mailer’s most notable literary influences, Ernest Hemingway. Mailer wrestled with the looming influence of Hemingway to such an extent that the relationship merits its own focused study. When it was first published, The Naked and the Dead invited immediate comparisons to Hemingway, which had much to do with the two authors similar thematic concerns. For years, Mailer alternately fought against and embraced these comparisons, wrestling with Hemingway’s influence, writing about him on more than one occasion (in pieces such as 1956’s “Nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President” and 1963’s “Punching Papa” among others), and writing an unanswered letter to him as well.

“Wharton and the Romance Plot” describes the relationship among three of Wharton’s novels that are heavily indebted to romance conventions – The House of Mirth, The Reef, and Summer. The failure of each narrative to reach the happy ending of a wished-for marriage provides readers with one means of questioning the actions of each pair of carefully drawn characters: is the absence of a fairy-tale ending the fault of Lily or Selden? Anna or George? Charity or Lucius? As Wharton changes the conventions of romance, she asks the reader to do a different kind of reading, a more socially based critique, one dependent on expectations by gender. Literary history seems to have prejudiced readers against Wharton’s early women characters, yet Henry James saw all too clearly how noble Anna Leathe was. With Lily Bart dead, and Charity Royall summarily wed, the fact that Anna wins the lover she desires breaks the often-cliched romance plot in her favor.

To consider the effect of Sylvia Plath's writing on today's poetry scene is to marvel at the endurance of her poems. Nearly thirty years ago, Denise Levertov remarked that a poet need write only a few remarkable poems to be remembered. It goes almost without saying that Plath wrote more than several such poems. More to the point is the fact that the poems of Plath's Ariel and, in retrospect, The Colossus, had the power to transform the direction of American - and to some extent, British - poetics. Here in the twenty-first century, the results of the impact of Plath's work are as pervasive as the influence of Ernest Hemingway's terse yet open prose. These effects are so commonplace that readers today no longer comment that contemporary fiction owes a great deal to Hemingway, the classic modernist. Nor do they align much of contemporary poetry with the influence of Plath's Ariel in 1965 and, even more dramatically, with her Collected Poems in 1981.

Changes in stylistic expression, in each case, marked more than shifts in the techniques of writing. Both Hemingway and Plath thrust deep into their inner lives to find what was worthy of their expression. Impolitic as it was for Hemingway to reveal the painful divergence of his Oak Park, Illinois, parents - which he did so sharply in such In Our Time stories as 'Indian Camp', 'The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife', and 'Cat in the Rain', even more dangerous to her family and her psyche was the insistent anger of Plath's 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy' and 'Medusa'. To voice these strident emotions was to unearth new ways of writing. Neither Hemingway nor Plath had earlier models to follow.

It is no coincidence that Gertrude Stein makes her appearance on the first page of Hemingway's treatise about the bullfights, their rituals, and their matadors. Had it not been for Stein, Hemingway might never have gone to Pamplona at all; might never have invested the Spanish art (and, by extension, the Spanish and Catholic cultures) with the kind of high seriousness he gave them. But in the manner that came to be typical of Ernest Hemingway, the very fact that he owed Stein some thanks for this introduction to the art of bullfighting made her suspect. Throughout Death in the Afternoon, the author-as-character shows his antipathy toward the Old lady figure who, without much of a stretch, seems to be a surrogate Gertrude. In the author-persona's use of references, names, sexual innuendoes, and comments about writing, he establishes a covert text about Stein's friends, aesthetic principles, and personal mannerisms.

Hemingway's homage to bullfighting had begun, of course, with several columns he had written for the Toronto Star. In limning the exotic — the places and scenes beyond the headily familiar aspects of postwar Paris — he drew on both his coverage of the Turkish War (and on his other European and Continental travels) and on his own leisure time activities: fishing, drinking in the cafés, skiing, and, most exotic of all, going to bullfights. As a journalist, Hemingway knew that writing about different experiences was a way to insure some publication. If those experiences were new or obscure enough, writing about them was also a way to avoid correction or contradiction.

It also seemed as if Hemingway moved under a neon sign that flashed whenever he was occupied in ways that would have most disturbed his mother, the ever-proper Grace Hall-Hemingway of Oak Park, Illinois. Going to the bullfights would have been high on her list of disreputable pastimes. We know that drinking fell into that category too, and we can imagine where Hemingway would have assumed that Grace would have listed his and Hadley's experimental lovemaking. Once Grace had moved her older son out of the family cottage, a year before he married Hadley Richardson, much of his physical and psychic behavior was aimed at getting back at his mother, at instructing her about activities she could not presume to understand.