Ernest Hemingway was the master of the simple, declarative sentence during his time. By contrast, when Saul Bellow came along, he wrote descriptive sentences full of verbal energy. “This was a great shift in the American notion of what a great prose style was,” said Philip Roth.
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- What he did is he blew the lid off of the sentence.
The lid had been put on by Hemingway.
Hemingway was the reigning master of the American sentence.
Hemingway had stripped away all the stuffing that had gotten into the American sentence in the 19th century, and got down to the bare, shaker-like beauty of the declarative sentence.
And his motto was, don't think about it.
He lived off the surface of things.
And Bellow's motto was, think about it.
And so the sentences were full, not just of description, not just of verbal energy, but a mentalness.
Experience and consciousness, that enriches the sentence, you know?
And this was a great shift in the American notion of what a great prose style was.
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