Ernest Hemingway ranks “Huckleberry Finn” as the lonely epitome of American Literature. He wrote that “All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing good since.” (The Green Hills of Africa) I cannot say that I agree that quality stopped with the final sentence of Huck Finn but Hemingway is certainly correct in placing Mark Twain’s most famous work as a focal point in America’s literary history.

	American’s anthology of written works must begin as the country did: with the pilgrims. Cambridge educated John Winthrop delivers a powerful sermon onboard the Arbella entitled “A Model of Christian Charity”. Although this puritanical speech would influence American Exceptionalism there is nothing distinctly American amount it: it’s a Christian sermon delivered by a Christian for fellow believers. Thomas Morton is much the same; a Christian first, an Englishman second and not much of an American at all. William Bradford falls foul in the same way. Their writings are either attempts at Christian theology or descriptive biographies with ideologies from another country, none of which can be explained as American in nature. Puritan writing, while it has the prophetic and profound imagery it cannot be considered anymore American than Christianity or colonialism.
	The antebellum period provides perhaps the primary, and indeed first, piece of American Literature. The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, reads like an educated version of Magna Carta and installs in American citizens unalienable rights. In the meantime and well after one of the American Declaration’s signer’s, and the sixth President’s, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. It is a pragmatic approach towards people in particular and perhaps the first book that could be catagorised under the “self-help” label. In it he proffers examples of Socratic method and includes a list of thirteen virtues to aspire towards. (Anthology 535) These two texts are both written by peoples who consider themselves American writing for the benefit of America.
	But they fail to count as what Hemingway would call “writing” for two reasons: Scotland’s “Declaration of Arbroath” has within it a concept of freedom. The ultimately unknown penman wrote: “It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.” Freedom is no more American than conservatism. Ultimately, though, the answer is more human: in the first scene of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” news anchor Will McAvoy is asked what makes America the greatest country in the world.  He answers, eventually, 	that James Madison was a genius, the constitution a masterpiece, with the Declaration being the greatest piece of American writing. The interviewer replies that one is a set of laws and the other a notification of war. (Newsroom) These are inhuman answer to a human question; Hemingway remarks that these cannot be considered literature if Magna Carta is not and Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Workbook” is not. And I agree.

	The post Revolutionary Period aids in ushering in rationalism to the American ethos. This coupled with the successful “Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas” throws the country into a tumultuous set of political, theological and ideological, arguments. The capacity to produce intelligent discourse is not what makes writing good.
	Finally, 50 years after the country’s unification novelists begin to appear whose livelihood is writing.  One of the first, and certainly one of the most famous, of these novelists was Edgar Allen Poe. Hemingway’s gripe with Poe would almost certainly be stylistic. It is intentionally witty, flamboyant and often needless in length. Examples of this are strewn throughout “The Cask of Amontillado” (715-719) The short story, briefly, takes place in an unnamed Italian city where a murderer takes revenge on his companion by immuring him deep within the catacombs. Poe describes the drunken victim’s eyes as “two filmy orbs that distilled the rheum of intoxication”  (716) which while delightful is, to Hemingway, no different from calling him drunk. Poe continues by describing their journey deeper into the bowels of the dead tunnels: “{They} passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, descending again… “ (717) The repetition of both “passed” and “descending” serve the narrative by making their walk longer. It also gives the reader a sense of time passing and a sense of foreboding. It is an effective literary technique that Hemingway would have labelled as pleonasm. Nathaniel Hawthrone embellishes in similar fashion. He wrote “Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister with the grave and intent regard of a physician towards his patient.” (572) Grave and intent mean much the same thing; to look intently is to look earnestly, which is to look sincerely, which is to look gravely. Hawthrone also employs a simile when he describes the way in which Chillingworth is looking. This is again an effective use of a well-known literary technique that Hemingway would have considered a waste of words. Hemingway’s implicit denunciation of these authors does not come about because he has a preference in prose: instead he would have called them liars. These constant additions of rhetorical garnish make them liars; Hemingway’s entire library of works is dedicated to telling the truth.
	This use of “unneeded words that are superfluous and unnecessary” (157) conflicts with Hemingway’s hallmark journalistic style. It is identified by its idiomatic language and impersonality coupled with a factual emphasis. Hemingway called it the Iceberg Theory and less popularly it has been called the Theory of Omission. Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s biographer, wrote that he learned “how to get the most from the least, how to prune language and avoid waste motion, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth.” (iceberg wiki) It is important to remind us that Hemingway’s preference in prose is not why he find fault with other authors. It is through this prose that he believes you find the most truthful stories. Before this migration of journalists to literature pomp was in part the norm; the last few sentences of Poe’s short story should illustrate the point. He writes “Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace resquiescat!” (719) There is a boldness in this; a dramatic flair thrown in by first the foreign language and second the exclamation mark. “Rampart of bones” is a fantastic use of imagery but hardly accurate. Even the use of “mortal” adds a gravitas to the work’s final lines. This contrasts well with Twain’s last lines taken from Huck Finn: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” (Huck 319) There is no imagery, simile or metaphor. It is still clever though and certainly has a powerful message: the vernacular of the “Missouri Negro Dialect” (Huck 10) lends itself to both polysyndetons and enallages. The run-on sentence and the deliberate misspelling of “civilize” act as a separation between Huck and society-proper. This is reinforced by his want to go out to the territories: the still wild lands not yet marred by a civilization that Huck has grown to fear and distrust. This is an example of journalistic writing and is comparable to Hemingway’s own.
	It is said that the greatest respect that can be paid to an author or artist or creator is to steal from them. Hemingway’s closing paragraph reads:
	“But after I had got them out and the shut door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It 	was like saying good-by to a statue. After I while I went out and left the hospital and walked 	back to the hotel in the rain.” (Hemingway 319)
This is not entirely dissimilar to Twain’s writing in that there is not much obvious symbolism. In fact it tries very hard not to have much symbolism. There is pathetic fallacy found in the rain and a simile. But it is still “expressively drained of expressiveness.” (Guardian)

	Hemingway’s inducted liking of Twain’s writing style is a symptom of why Hemingway values the novel so highly; it adds up to a greater realist aesthetic. This attempt at writing things as truthfully as possible is best explained through contrast with a “dishonest” novel: Jane Eyre. The protagonist has prophetic dreams, a ghostly uncle and a chestnut tree that mirrors an ongoing relationship. This is an example of being dishonest in fiction; these do not occur in nature so they would have no place in a realist novel. This is best summarised not by their novels but by their thoughts on their own novels. Twain begins “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with an epistrophic warning: “Persons attempting to find a motive in the narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” (Huck 9) The rebellion against these comes from realism because none of these occur in reality. At least not in the same way as they do in novels. Hemingway puts it more vulgarly; “There isn’t any symbolysm {sic}. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit.” (selected letters)  But just because these men are not symbolic does not mean they cannot carry forward powerful themes and examine the human condition.

	One would have to be fool to write that “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is devoid of meaning. There is a primary theme that would come to be an obsession of the 20th century and in particular Stein’s “Lost Generation”.  Identity and its place within a society is something that Huck struggles with throughout the novel. The protagonist often has his moral compass set in contrast with the values being taught to him. He is told to value clean clothes but the hallmark of a good way is muck all over; grammar and linguistics are important but he communicates in vernacular; religion is preached but it would enslave his friend Jim. In fact it is freeing of Jim that acts, in part, as the novel’s climax. He shouts  ““All right, then, I’ll go to Hell” -and tore it up.”” (Huck 234) Huck sets Jim free and in doing so condemns himself in a slave-society. The juxtaposition between the two is not resolved by Huck’s identity is: he wants to be “wild” if being civilised means allowing Jim’s enslavement among other things. This is further emphasised at the end of the novel where he expresses a want to remain uncivilised and flee to the Indian Terrorities to the West. This examination of identity clings to American literature perhaps due to a surge of existentialist Frenchmen; it does become a massive theme in American literature which goes some way into explaining why Hemingway wrote all American writing comes from Huck Finn.

	It should now be plain to see that Hemingway finds value in this aesthetic and Twain’s pioneering of the American version. But is it fair to say that this writing style and philosophy lead to all American literature?
	The writing style persists but not universally. The skeletal structure of the Iceberg Theory has been adopted by contemporaries of Mark Twain, such as Stephen Crane, and contemporaries of Ernest Hemingway. However, it is the aesthetic and indeed the goal that ought to be measured against Hemingway’s claim: did the realist aesthetic stay the dominate force in American literature?  I think the answer is both yes and no in unequal parts; the crux of the aesthetic is very much the staple of early 20th Century American writing. That is to say that the want for truth remains the focus but it is not all achieved in the same way as Twain and Hemingway achieved it.
	The best written book does well to illustrate what I mean: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is a literary masterpiece with no sense of what makes a good classical novel. Everything that serves to accelerate the plot is told to the reader second hand. In that sense it is fairly realistic: the protagonist does not have that uncanny ability to be around every plot pivot and important monologue. But regardless Gatsby is not a realist piece of work; it has heavily symbolic parts. The first is perhaps ironic in its symbolism: the green light that sees Gatsby into the grave. The second piece is the great billboard with the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg.  There is a dispute over wether or not they represent the eyes of God or just a nihilistic view of America. It does not matter either way; it just matters that they are obviously symbolic of something.
	Twain’s legacy is still visible though: cut through the symbolism and you have a want to tell a human story that can be as true as possible. Most importantly it is about people, their place in the world and how incompatible it all seems. This theme would later be picked up and have a bolder rolled over it endless by absurdist theatre. In American literature the focus remains on the human condition; Twain’s legacy is a change in focus. Works slowly become more human in nature. Works cease to focus on the plot and the journey and the outside world and turn inward. Miller, Plath, and Nabokov all continue in the same vein as the Lost Generation. But even Bukowski and Ginsberg and Vonnegut all lend themselves to Twain’s legacy on American literature: they are all obsessed with the themes of identity and truthfulness.