Hemingway’s Jewish Progeny

Roth and Goldstein in The Naked and the Dead

Authors

  • Ezra Cappell University of Texas at El Paso Author

Keywords:

Ernest Hemingway, The Naked and the Dead, Jewish identity in literature, antisemitism in American literature, literary influence , twentieth-century American war fiction

Abstract

Ernest Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which established Hemingway’s lean, hard literary voice—a style that would influence countless American writers. In 1948, a young Norman Mailer published his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, to critical and commercial acclaim. Mailer established a hard and unforgiving narrative voice very much in Hemingway’s debt. Yet there is another aspect which unites the early work of these two often compared writers: their representation of stereotypical Jewish characters. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway created his petulant and “superior” Jewish character, Robert Cohn, who is often seen in the narrative as being a step out of line with WASP characters.

Author Biography

  • Ezra Cappell, University of Texas at El Paso

    Ezra Cappell is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Inter-American Jewish Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Prof. Cappell teaches and publishes in the fields of Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Jewish American Literature. He has published numerous articles on American and Jewish American writing and he is the author of American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction (SUNY Press, 2007) and is a frequent lecturer on Jewish American culture and Holocaust writing.

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Published

2026-03-25

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2010): Literary Warriors

Section

Articles

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