Experience.

What Hemingway captured, in other words, was the familiar, personal, very un-Jamesian experience of processing the world directly in time. His work of this period connects with our animal habits of consciousness. And the struggle it brings to the foreground is the struggle to make sense of—to find a line of narrative through—this disordered experience. Hemingway’s insight was to understand that this struggle was not just a literary one. It’s a fundamental part of how people themselves perceive and try to make sense of the world.

Hemingway looms large not so much for what he wrote, or in what tone, but how he captured his imagination in words—his skill in setting the American vernacular in a way that brings a lost, varied, and messy store of personal experience to life.

Read the rest at Slate.