Hemingway - Descriptive Writer

These varying reactions seem to me worth noting because of the indubitable fact that Hemingway has, since his first success, exercised more influence on American fiction than any other contemporary novelist. My own feeling about him has always been that he is one of the best descriptive writers in English, surpassed only by Kipling and a very few others; a master in the evocation of mood--most perfectly displayed in some of the short stories, and in certain situations of the novels. He is not, and never has been, a creator of character in the sense that novelists like Balzac and Tolstoy were, and has never come remotely near the understanding of human life and the values of which it is composed that are essential to great fiction. - J. Donald Adams (1950)