Hemingway's Dark Night: Catholic Influences and Intertextualities in the Work of Ernest Hemingway

This study is concerned with the way Hemingway's conversion to Catholicism, his interpretation of the Catholic faith, and his perspective on, devotion to, and understanding of Catholicism profoundly influenced and informed his fiction. While he was a practicing Catholic for most of his adult life, scholarship has rarely considered Hemingway among other Catholic and Christian writers like Flannery O'Connor, G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, T. S. Eliot, et al. Instead, Hemingway has existed for many readers and scholars based on the myth of Papa, a myth that prefers to see the writer wrestling with marlin or shooting lions, not lighting candles in cathedrals or giving a Nobel Prize medal to the Virgin of Cobre. The present study is not concerned so much with myth or with mythopoeia as much as it is concerned with close reading of Hemingway's fiction in regard to biographical facts and the geographical and historical contexts of his life. While Hemingway may never be considered a part of some Catholic group of writers, close reading of his works and the contexts of those works may reveal the profound influence Catholicism had on his fiction.