Most Overrated Writer of the Previous Century

That is not that I think Hemingway was a bad writer, but no writer could sustain the hype that surrounded him.  His simple style is also easy to parody, rarely a good sign for a writer.  However arguments about taste are always a chase after wind.

More interesting is that Hemingway was a Catholic convert, having been baptized as a Catholic by an Italian priest when he was in danger of death after being wounded by shrapnel in 1918 while serving on the Italian Front as an ambulance driver.  When he married his second wife he went through a formal conversion process in 1927.  His Catholicism had little impact on his private life, as his four wives and his suicide in 1961 demonstrated, and as he freely admitted, but it is difficult not to place him in the category of bad Catholic instead of the much more damning category of pretend Catholic.

He had an apparently sincere devotion to the Blessed Virgin, donating his 1954 Nobel Prize for literature medal to the shrine of the Our Lady of Cobre in Cuba.  He referred to Mary as “God’s listening post”.  He frequently visited Catholic cathedrals and shrines throughout the globe, and the characters in his novels often turn to Catholic prayers and other spiritual practices in times of crisis.  He supported the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but he respected the Carlists, as can be seen in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943).  He noted that he didn’t want to be called a Catholic writer because of his bad personal life, but he never rejected the Faith so far as I know.  All three of his kids were raised as Catholics.  Let us pray that before his soul left his body God granted him an opportunity to repent, and may we all have that grace before our own mortal lives end.