The influences behind Fight Club

1996

Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk

Late 20th-century American. United States. Written in English.

Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel follows an unnamed insomniac office worker who, with the anarchic Tyler Durden, founds a bare-knuckle fight club that grows into a terrorist cult, before Tyler turns out to be the narrator's other self. It is written in a clipped, repetitive minimalist style learned in Tom Spanbauer's workshop.

Where it came from

Find “Fight Club” on Amazon

1985

Reasons to Live

Amy Hempel

American minimalism. United States. Written in English.

Hempel's first story collection, including 'In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried', built from compressed, oblique sentences.

What it handed down

To Fight Club (1996)

Stylistic influence, well documented.

Palahniuk praised Hempel's minimalism in his essay 'Not Chasing Amy' and named her as a model. Fight Club's short declarative sentences, recurring choruses and withheld emotion follow her method of compression.

Where it came from

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Raymond Carver 1976

Find “Reasons to Live” on Amazon

1976

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Raymond Carver

American minimalism. United States. Written in English.

Carver's first major story collection of working-class lives, edited by Gordon Lish.

What it handed down

To Reasons to Live (1985)

Stylistic influence, probable.

Hempel studied with Gordon Lish, Carver's editor, and her stories share the compressed, understated minimalism of Carver's first collection. Critics grouped them in the 1980s 'minimalist' school.

Where it came from

In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway 1925

Find “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” on Amazon

1925

In Our Time

Ernest Hemingway

Lost Generation. United States / Paris. Written in English.

Hemingway's story collection, alternating Nick Adams stories with brief vignettes of war and violence.

What it handed down

To Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976)

Stylistic influence, well documented.

Carver named Hemingway as an early model in his essay 'Fires'. His flat declarative prose and stories that stop before the crisis is explained follow the 'iceberg' method of Hemingway's early stories.

Where it came from

Find “In Our Time” on Amazon

1919

Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson

American modernism. United States. Written in English.

A cycle of linked stories about the lonely 'grotesques' of a small Ohio town.

What it handed down

To In Our Time (1925)

Structural model, well documented.

Anderson befriended the young Hemingway and gave him letters of introduction to Paris. Hemingway's early stories of a Midwestern boy follow Anderson's linked-story book, with Nick Adams in the role of George Willard.

Where it came from

Find “Winesburg, Ohio” on Amazon

1852

A Sportsman's Sketches

Ivan Turgenev

Russian realism. Russia. Written in Russian.

Linked sketches of peasants and landowners observed by a hunter wandering the Russian countryside.

What it handed down

To Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Structural model, probable.

Anderson admired Turgenev, and the loosely linked sketches of rural people seen through one wandering observer offered a model for a book of connected stories. The influence is general rather than tied to specific borrowings.

Where it came from

The line stops here: minor branch.

Find “A Sportsman's Sketches” on Amazon

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Fight Club (1996)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Reasons to Live (1985)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To In Our Time (1925)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Where it came from

Share this