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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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1915

Spoon River Anthology

Edgar Lee Masters

Chicago Renaissance. United States. Written in English.

Free-verse epitaphs in which the dead of a small Illinois town speak their secrets.

What it handed down

To Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Structural model, probable.

Anderson wrote Winesburg in Chicago shortly after Masters' book, and both expose the hidden lives of a small Midwestern town through a gallery of individual portraits. Critics link the two, though Anderson spoke less of Masters than of other models.

Where it came from

The Greek Anthology, Anonymous c. 900 (compiled)

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c. 900 (compiled)

The Greek Anthology

Anonymous

Byzantine compilation of Greek epigram. Byzantium. Written in Ancient Greek.

A collection of Greek epigrams, many of them funerary, composed from the archaic to the Byzantine period.

What it handed down

To Spoon River Anthology (1915)

Structural model, well documented.

In 1913 William Marion Reedy gave Masters J. W. Mackail's Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology. Its brief funerary epigrams spoken by or about the dead gave Masters the form of his epitaph-monologues.

Where it came from

The line stops here: an anthology spanning many centuries whose sources are mostly lost Greek epigrammatists.

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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

What it handed down

To Spoon River Anthology (1915)

Where it came from

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