“Hills like white elephants” by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway employs a terse, laconic style—an economic use of words to create his version of reality. From mentors during his expatriate days in Paris, he learned the technique of repetition for effect and for creating realistic, penetrating images. He is also associated with his iceberg theory of writing, so called because the deeper meaning in a novel, as with icebergs, is elusive at first glance: while one-eighth is immediately visible, seven-eighths remain below the surface. Well known, too, is the metaphorically (but sometimes physically) wounded Hemingway hero, emblematic of the Lost Generation that followed ...