the adventures of papa and bill

there are, as far as i am aware, two famous literary disputes about length involving ernest hemingway. the first was with his buddy, f. scott fitzgerald over the length of his wiener. the second was a dispute with his adversary, william faulkner over the length of the words they chose.

faulkner fired the first shot saying, “hemingway has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” which earned the following riposte from hemingway, “poor faulkner. does he really think big emotions come from big words? i know all the ten-dollar words as he does, but i prefer the older, simpler ones.”

i decided to chart the longest words in each of their major works and see if i could draw a non-scientific conclusion. the longest of all words was faulkner’s cinderstrewnpacked, which only appears in the dictionary of made up words that william faulkner made up.

additional data: the average word length in these three hemingway novels is 3.85 letters; faulkner’s average word length is 3.88 letters, which is statistically the same. 1.08% of hemingway’s words were 10 letters or more whereas 1.56% of faulkner’s were.

conclusion: hype. the top two 20th century american novelists were engaging in a literary pillow fight so they could ride the gravy train of book sales for as long as the public would allow.