Hemingway’s Slang in Lyndsay Faye’s The Paragon Hotel

Abstract

The historical novelist Lyndsay Faye pilfered Hemingway’s 1918 correspondence for slang usages that would definitively locate the characters in her 2019 book, The Paragon Hotel, in the late nineteen-teens, rather than have the novel’s dialogue bleed into usages more common in the high-Jazz Age. Cross-referencing text from the novel with Hemingway’s 1918 correspondence collected in the Hemingway Letters Project, then comparing the results against entries from the Oxford English Dictionary and the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, shows the complex relationship between the voices of the Faye’s characters—particularly the novel’s narrator—and the young Ernest Hemingway.