Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter are very different sorts of writers, with different styles and different ways of structuring their material. Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a collection by Porter containing three long stories, or novelettes, while Hemingway's collection In Our Time contains a number of short stories held together by material separating the stories as if they were chapters in a larger work. Both writers tackle some of the major themes of fiction, including death, war, and sex, but they see these issues in somewhat different ways and present their material in their own unique styles. Both writers might be called stylists in that they make strong use of language to create a poetic vision in words, but Hemingway's spare style is not the same as the direct and descriptive style used by Porter.
Hemingway can be classified as a modernist in fiction. Modernism is a term applied retroactively to certain literary and artistic trends at the beginning of the twentieth century. Modernism rejected traditions that existed in the nineteenth century and sought to stretch the boundaries, striking out in new directions and with new techniques. More was demanded of the reader of literature or the viewer of art. Answers were not presented directly to issues raised, but instead the artist demanded the participation of the audience more directly in elucidating meaning and in seeing the relationship between technique and meaning (Baldick 140). In literature, writers developed new structures as a way of casting a new light on such accepted elements as character, setting, and plot. Much of modernist fiction shows this increased demand on the reader. Ernest Hemingway gives the illusion of moving in the other direction by simplifying language to the point where it seems ascetic, but in truth his language is complex in its way, building meaning into every word and the placement of every word much like poetry. The reader needs ...