A Farewell to Arms is my entry point to Ernest Hemingway. It came up through William Faulkner. Apparently, the two are polar opposites when it comes to the complexity of their prose and the vocabulary you need to read them. They were not shy about it either:
He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
This reminds me of how people talk about Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s plain, conversational Malayalam next to M. T. Vasudevan Nair’s more lyrical prose. I’m not sure the comparison holds, but I’ll find out after reading both Americans.