Historical Context
"The Killers" was written in the 1920s when organized crime was at its prime during Prohibition. Chicago was the home of Al Capone. Hemingway himself had spent time in Chicago as a young man. When things became too dangerous for the mob they would retreat to the suburb of Summit, where "The Killers" takes place. Despite Hemingway's knowledge of organized crime he omitted much of that background from the story. Hemingway himself said, "That story probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote. I left out all Chicago, which is hard to do in 2951 words."
Read more about this topic: The Killers (short Story)
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or context:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of—career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)