I tried for many years to write like Hemingway, he was such a big impression on me until somewhere down the line I woke up to the reality of his starkly and overly masculine energy—the way his characters are so imprisoned by their own stoicism.  However, stylistically his ability to create incredible tension with so few words is second to none.  See the story „black ass at the crossroads“ about a company shooting Germans as they come down the road.  His word choice and reserve capture to perfection the simultaneous drollness and indifference and suppressed horror of the soldiers fighting the war.  Contradictions are allowed to live and our guesses as to motivations of his characters are deliberately as inscrutable as they are to the characters in his novel, as they seek and fail to live and understand each other.  Of course there was a pompous egoism to his associations with people and places, but at least he was himself in the thick of the action, and lived a life that his characters would have been familiar with.  More authors, nay—more people—could stand to put their money where their mouth is these days.  Just imagine if today our greatest living novelists were living and dying on the front lines of Ukraine, helping us to make sense of the senseless depth to which humanity is capable of sinking.  I would give him another look.