Just ask yourself if the name Scrooge is known to the general public--and ditto for Frankenstein. Compare them with characters in Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations.
Or, check how many derivative works of Frankenstein exist vs Pride and Prejudice. I am surprised this is even considered debatable since it is so obvious. I bet Chris Frayling would be gobsmacked to even see this being debated.
We don't know how GoodReads reviews are affected by school curriculums. How likely is Lovecraft part of any school programs vs the other authors? It would be much more telling to see which authors are read on their own. The fact that no one, including academics, could bother to post examples of Hemingwayesque suggests a lack of enthusiasm--and enthusiasm for an artist's work is primary to what I am talking about. Mandatory reading in a school program is not.
Did you know the movie
Clueless is based on Austen's
Emma? Or that
I Walk with a Zombie is a version of
Jane Eyre? The kind of influence an Austen or Hemingway exert may fly under the radar more easily than the influence of a Lovecraft, more subtle because it doesn't require massive special effects but shows in prose quality and choices of setting and those made in telling a story.
1) Don't underestimate the influence of secular (i.e. non-academic) critics of mid-century America like Edmund Wilson and Clifton Fadiman who had quite a bit of influence on sizable sections of the reading public.
2) Hemingway's influence in one direction was about pared down prose. When he showed up in the 1920s his prose almost immediately became the prose du jour then stayed influential for at least 40 years; writers looking for serious attention either began writing like him or, put off by him, purposely wrote differently (maybe Faulkner, for example, though I don't know that Faulkner was particularly put off by him). Writers who looked to him as an example include John O'Hara, John Steinbeck, probably Erskine Caldwell to some extent, Norman Mailer, Raymond Carver; I haven't read Richard Price or Robert Stone, but suspect from what I've read about them they are sons of Papa; I have read Cormac McCarthy and I'd definitely call him a son of Papa, at least in his later work like
The Road.
3) Hemingway influenced a raft of hard-boiled writers like Horace McCoy, W.R. Burnett, Dorothy B. Hughes (reading a novel by her now and it stems from the
noir suspense novels that were influenced by Hemingway), James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and all their descendants like Ross Macdonald, James Crumley, Sara Paretsky, James Ellroy, etc. Directly or indirectly this also affected sf/f/h: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Fred Brown, Leigh Brackett, C. M. Kornbluth, and many other notables wrote in the vernacular common to their day which was one of Hemingway's lasting influences on prose, choosing the informal voice over the more formal voice of writers like Henry James.
4) The influence of Hemingway may be harder to trace because his writing style was a different kind of flamboyant than HPL's that most writers wanting serious attention didn't/don't want to mimic too directly while trying to find their own voice, whereas for the playfulness of early HPL imitators trying to capture his style was part of the fun. (Which was also part of the fun for those parodying Hemingway, like E. B. White.) Further, because Hemingway didn't toss consonants into a pile to create an alien name it becomes harder to trace internal evidence of influence; it's unlikely many writers will use the name Jake Barnes or Richard Jordan in fiction (the latter maybe for multiple reasons now).
5) Lovecraft's major influence seems to come from movies and video games. While his work has not fared well in film with a few exceptions (
Re-animator,
The Resurrected), it's informed many films that aren't too directly tied to his stories (
Alien, much of Guillermo Del Toro's work).
6) I think you make a mistake in your conclusion about enthusiasm for their subject: The audiences for these two writers may overlap some (he says, raising his hand) but not all that much and the audience for Hemingway -- who hasn't been out of print since initial publication (a fairly rare feat and especially when that includes a collection of short stories) -- may be less likely to be vocal about it on the Internet than Lovecraft's fans. Hemingway may not be as obviously influential at this time, but I think his influence is more pervasive on a deeper level of creativity.
Frankly, if you're strictly talking mass audience popularity, you might be right at the moment. You could make similar arguments about previously popular writers. But if you're talking long-term influence and retaining a massive readership, I'd put my money on Hemingway.
Randy M.
