The Killers (Historical Context)

Historical Context

1920s

When Hemingway wrote "The Killers" in 1926, the United States was at the height of the Prohibition era, and criminal activity, particularly in Chicago, was rampant, with gangsters such as Al Capone and Dutch Schultz controlling the bootlegging industry and a good part of the police force as well. In 1919, Capone had come to Chicago from New York City, where he had worked for crime boss Frankie Yale. In Chicago, he worked for Yale's old mentor, John Torrio. Capone took control of Torrio's saloons, gambling houses, racetracks, and brothels when Torrio was shot by rival gang members and left Chicago. Historians estimate the income from Capone's interests from illegal activities at $100,000,000 a year between 1925 and 1930. This is the image readers had in mind in 1927 when they read that Ole Andreson "got mixed up in something in Chicago."

However, Hemingway wrote the story in Madrid, Spain. Like many American writers and artists, Hemingway became disillusioned with the values of post-World War I America and relocated to Europe. Writers such as John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, and F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Paris, as did Hemingway for a time, and led bohemian lives, drinking heavily, having affairs, and experimenting with new subject material and style. Gertrude Stein, a controversial writer and a wealthy art collector, held salons at her house at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, where many artists and writers met to drink, discuss their work, and receive advice from Stein. It was Stein who coined the term "a lost generation" to refer to Hemingway and his contemporaries, describing their spiritual isolation, cynicism, and amorality. It was at one of Stein's salons in the early 1920s that she met Hemingway, who presented her with a letter of introduction from American writer Sherwood Anderson. Stein urged Hemingway to quit journalism and become a full-time writer. Other writers associated with the "lost generation" include expatriates such as Malcolm Cowley, Ezra Pound, and Archibald MacLeish.

As a result of World War I, in which Hemingway served as an ambulance driver, and the catastrophic loss of human life (tens of millions killed and wounded), many people lost faith in God, ideas of nationhood, even reality itself. Theories by intellectuals and scientists such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Sir James George Frazer, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein presented the world as a place of uncertainty and chaos in which appearances are not what they seem. In his essay on "The Killers" for The Explicator, Quentin E. Martin argues that these new theories are useful in understanding Hemingway's story. Citing character confusion in the story, Martin claims, "'The Killers' can be seen as a concise and dramatic representation of certain aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity and Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy (or uncertainty)." Other writers consciously applied these theories to their work as well, helping to shape literary modernism. T. S. Eliot's poem The Wasteland (1922), for example, deploys allusion, symbol, and fragments to describe a world that had literally fallen to pieces. In her novel To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf uses a stream-of-consciousness narrative to prioritize subjective experience over the depiction of an objective world, drawing from ideas popularized by philosopher Bergson.

Expatriates in Europe were not the only ones producing lasting literature during the time between the world wars. In America, writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Alain Locke wrote about the African-American experience, giving white America a glimpse into the lives and cultures of a historically oppressed people. Harlem, in uptown New York City, became a magnet for African-American poets, artists, writers, musicians, and playwrights. Representative literary works of the Harlem Renaissance include Johnson's 1927 poetry collection God's Trombone: Seven Negro Folk Sermons, one of the more popular works of the era which used the speech patterns of an old black preacher to capture the heart of the black idiom; Claude McKay's novel of working-class blacks, Home to Harlem (1927); and Jean Toomer's story of poor southern blacks, Cane (1923).

Compare & Contrast

• 1920s: Al Capone runs a murderous gang in Chicago, trafficking in alcohol and illegal gambling houses.
  Today: Organized crime is still widespread, but it is also more diffuse and less concentrated in particular cities. Authorities believe they have largely destroyed the "Mafia" when they put New York City crime boss John Gotti behind bars for life in 1992.
• 1920s: The life expectancy for American males is 53.6 years and for females 54.6 years.
  Today: The life expectancy for American males is 73.1 years and for females 79.1 years.
• 1920s: A crime wave sweeps the United States, as Prohibition helps spawn the bootlegging industry and increases in prostitution and gambling activities.
  Today: Alcohol is legally sold throughout the United States, and legal gambling, in the form of state lotteries and casinos, is widespread.