Mr. Ernest Hemingway versus The Sentence
When people talk about Hemingway's writing style the general sentiment tends to be that his writing is characterized by short, simple and direct sentences. I suppose that's mostly true, but it certainly isn't always true. If anything, the background of succinct sentences makes the divergences all the more clear.
The excerpt below is one of my favorites, and one I trot out (mentally) when I hear the "Oh yes, Hemingway? Love his stuff! Such short, powerfully clear sentences. A joy to read!" variety of commentary.
Maybe she would. Maybe she would pretend that I was her boy that was killed and we would go in the front door and the porter would take off his cap and I would stop at the concierge’s desk and ask for the key and she would stand by the elevator and then we would get in the elevator and it would go up very slowly clicking at all the floors and then our floor and the boy would open the door and stand there and she would step out and I would step out and we would walk down the hall and I would put the key in the door and open it and go in and then take down the telephone and ask them to send a bottle of capri bianca in a silver bucket full of ice and you would hear the ice against the pail coming down the corridor and the boy would knock and I would say leave it outside the door please. Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the window open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink the capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be...
A Farewell To Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
For the grammarians (not me!) the official term for this particular style of stringing together sentences with conjunctions is polysyndeton, which I came across when reading about Cormac McCarthy's style of writing1.