Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist and short story writer whose works, drawn from his wide range of experiences in World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II, are characterized by terse minimalism and understatement; they exerted a significant influence on the development of twentieth century fiction. Hemingway's protagonists are typically stoic male individuals, often interpreted as projections of his own character, who must master "grace under pressure". Many of his works, like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea, are now considered classics in the canon of American literature.
Hemingway was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, known as "The Lost Generation," a name coined and popularized by Gertrude Stein. Leading a turbulent social life, Hemingway married four times, allegedly formed various romantic relationships during his lifetime, and received much media exposure. Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, seven years before his death by suicide in 1961.
Early life
Hemingway was born at 8:00 A.M. on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by his maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, an English immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived with the family when Ernest was born. Hemingway's physician father, Clarence Hemingway, attended to the birth of Ernest and subsequently blew a horn on his front porch, announcing to the Hemingways' neighbors that his wife had borne a baby boy.
Hemingway was the firstborn son, the second of six children to Clarence ("Doctor Ed") and Grace Hemingway, a homemaker with considerable singing talent who had once aspired to an opera career and earned money through giving voice and music lessons, as well as recitals. His mother was also domineering and devoutly religious, mirroring the strict Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had "wide lawns and narrow minds"[1]. His mother had wanted to bear twins, and when this did not happen, she dressed young Ernest and his sister Marcelline (eighteen months his senior) in similar clothes and with similar hairstyles, maintaining the pretense of the two children being "twins." Grace Hemingway further feminized her son in his youth by calling him "Ernestine"[2] (while much is made of this by biographers—especially Kenneth S. Lynn—it should be noted that middle-class Victorian boys were often treated in this manner).
While his mother hoped that her son would develop an interest in music, Hemingway adopted his father's outdoorsy interests—hunting and fishing in the woods and lakes of northern Michigan. Owning a house, called Windemere, on Michigan's Walloon Lake, his family would often spend summers vacationing in that state. These early experiences in close contact with nature would instill in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure and for living in areas of the world generally considered remote or isolated.
First writing experiences
During his years at Oak Park and River Forest High School, Hemingway boxed and played football, as well as excelling academically, particularly in English classes. His first writing experience came in high school, as he served as editor for both Trapeze and Tabula, the school's newspaper and literary magazine, respectively.
When Hemingway graduated from high school, he did not pursue a college education. Instead, in 1916, when he was 17 years old, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. While he stayed at that newspaper for only about six months, throughout his lifetime he used the admonition from the Star's style guide as a foundation for his manner of writing: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative"[3].
World War I until the Spanish Civil War
Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months, and, against his father's wishes, tried to join the United States Army to see action in World War I. He supposedly failed the medical examination due to poor vision (there is no record of this), and instead joined the American Field Service Ambulance Corps and left for Italy, then fighting for the Allies. En route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris, which was under constant bombardment from German artillery. Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Hemingway tried to get as close to the combat as possible.
Soon after arriving on the Italian front, he witnessed the brutalities of the war; on his first day of duty, an ammunition factory near Milan suffered an explosion. Hemingway had to pick up the human remains, mostly of women who had worked at the factory. This first, extremely cruel encounter with human death left him shaken. The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror; for example, one of them, Eric Dorman-Smith, quoted to him a line from Part Two of Shakespeare's Henry IV: By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe god a death...and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next[4]. (Hemingway, for his part, would conjure this very same Shakespearean line in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, one of his later famous African short stories.) In another instance, a 50-year-old soldier, to whom Hemingway said, "You're troppo vecchio for this war, pop," replied, "I can die as well as any man"[5].
At the Italian front on July 8, 1918, Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, ending his career as an ambulance driver. The exact details of this attack are in dispute, but two facts are certain: Hemingway was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell which left fragments in both of his legs, and he was subsequently awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian government. Hemingway later claimed that he was transferred to the Italian infantry, where he was seriously injured in combat, but no record exists of this and it is likely an invention on his part.
After this experience, Hemingway convalesced in a Milan hospital run by the American Red Cross. There he was to meet a nurse, Sister Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, D.C., one of 18 nurses attending groups of 4 patients each. Hemingway fell in love with Kurowsky, who was more than 6 years older than he, but this first relationship did not last. After he returned to the United States, she fell in love with and married another man.
Literary aftermath of WWI
First novels and other early works
After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park. In 1920, he took a job in Toronto, Canada at the Toronto Star as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent. About this time, Hemingway met Canada's young literary prodigy Morley Callaghan, who also was a cub reporter at the same paper. Callaghan, who respected Hemingway's work, showed his own stories to him and Hemingway praised it as fine work.
In 1921, Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. Not long after the two were married, Hemingway allegedly had a scandalous affair with a woman by the name of Deborah Houston. They were supposedly in love, but Hemingway could not at the time go through with pursuing the relationship. On the other hand, the Hemingways decided to live abroad for a time, and, at the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled, along with Morley Callaghan and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Paris; there Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the Star. After the 1922 publication and American banning of colleague James Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway used Toronto-based friends to smuggle copies of the novel into the United States. Hemingway's own first book, called Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), was published in Paris by Robert McAlmon. In the same year, during a brief return to Toronto, Hemingway's first son, John, was born. Busy supporting a family, he became bored with the Toronto Star and resigned on January 1, 1924.
Hemingway's American debut in literature is often associated with the publication of the short story collection In Our Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters of the American version were initially published in Europe as in our time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway, reaffirming to him that his minimalist style could be accepted by the literary community. "The Big Two-Hearted River" is the collection's best-known story.
After Hemingway's return to Paris, Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced Hemingway to the "Parisian Modern Movement" then ongoing in Montparnasse Quarter; this was the beginnings of the American expatriate circle that became known as the Lost Generation, a term coined by Stein. The group often frequented Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 18 Rue de l'Odéon. Hemingway's other influential mentor was Ezra Pound[6], the founder of imagism. Hemingway later said in reminiscence of this eclectic group: Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right[7].
Hemingway's favorite restaurant in Montparnasse was La Closerie des Lilas. It was here, in just over 6 weeks, that he wrote his second novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). The novel, semi-autobiographical in that it follows a group of expatriate Americans in Europe, was successful and was met with much critical acclaim. While Hemingway had initially claimed that the novel was an obsolete form of literature, he was apparently inspired to write one after reading Fitzgerald's manuscript for The Great Gatsby.
Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic from Piggott, Arkansas, in 1927. Hemingway converted to Catholicism himself at this time. That year saw the publication of Men Without Women, a collection of short stories, containing "The Killers," one of Hemingway's best-known and most-anthologized stories.
In 1928, Hemingway's father, Clarence, troubled with diabetes and financial instabilities, committed suicide using an old Civil War pistol. This suicide caused great hurt for Hemingway; he immediately traveled to Oak Park to arrange the funeral, and caused controversy by mouthing the Catholic idea that suicides go to Hell. Another suicide was of Harry Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press and friend of Hemingway from his days in Paris.
In 1928 Hemingway's second son, Patrick, was born in Kansas City (his third son, Gregory, would be born to the couple a few years later). It was a Caesarean birth after difficult labor, details that were incorporated into the concluding scene of his novel A Farewell to Arms, the last important work associated with the period following World War I. It details the romance between Frederic Henry, an American soldier, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The novel is heavily autobiographical in nature: the plot is directly inspired by his experience with Sister von Kurowsky in Milan; the intense labor pains of his second wife, Pauline, in the birth of Hemingway's son Patrick inspired Catherine's labor in the novel; the real-life Kitty Cannell inspired the fictional Helen Ferguson; the priest was based on Don Giuseppe Bianchi, the priest of the 69th and 70th regiments of the Brigata Ancona. While the inspiration of the character Rinaldi is mysterious, curiously, he had already appeared in In Our Time.
A Farewell to Arms was published at a time when many other World War I books were prominent, including Frederic Manning's Her Privates We, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That. A Farewell to Arms's success rendered Hemingway essentially independent financially.
The (First) Forty Nine Stories
Several of Hemingway's most famous short stories were written in the period following the war; in 1938—along with his only full-length play, entitled The Fifth Column—49 such stories were published in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. Hemingway's intention was, as he openly stated in his own foreword to the collection, to write more. Many of the stories that make up this collection can be found in other abridged collections, including In Our Time, Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
Some of the collection's important stories include: Old Man at the Bridge, On The Quai at Smyrna, Hills Like White Elephants, One Reader Writes, The Killers and (perhaps most famously) A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. While these stories are rather short, the book also includes much longer stories. Among these the most famous are The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
Only one other story collection by Hemingway appeared during his lifetime, entitled Four Stories Of The Spanish Civil War; "The Denunciation" is the most notable story therein. The Nick Adams Stories appeared posthumously in 1972. What is now considered the definitive compilation of all of Hemingway's short stories is published as The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, first compiled and published in 1987.
Early critical interplay
Hemingway's early works sold well and were generally received favorably by critics. This success elicited some crude and pretentious behavior from Hemingway, even in these formative years of his career. For example, he began to tell F. Scott Fitzgerald how to write; he also claimed that the English novelist Ford Madox Ford was sexually impotent. Hemingway in turn was the subject of much criticism. The journal Bookman attacked him as a dirty writer. According to Fitzgerald, McAlmon, the publisher of his first non-commercial book, labeled Hemingway "a fag and a wife-beater"[8] and claimed that Pauline was a lesbian (she is alleged to have had lesbian affairs after their divorce). Gertrude Stein criticized him in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, suggesting that he had derived his prose style from her own and from Sherwood Anderson's[9].
Max Eastman disparaged Hemingway harshly, asking him to "come out from behind that false hair on the chest" (these accusations led to a physical confrontation between the two). Eastman would go on to write an essay entitled Bull in the Afternoon, a satire of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Another facet of Eastman's criticism consisted in the suggestion that Hemingway ought to give up his lonely, tight-lipped stoicism and write about contemporary social affairs. Hemingway did so for at least a short time; his article Who Murdered the Vets? for New Masses, a leftist magazine, and To Have and Have Not displayed a certain heightened social awareness.
Key West
Following the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway moved to Key West, Florida where he established his first American home. From his old stone house—a wedding present from Pauline's uncle—Hemingway fished in the Dry Tortugas waters, went to the famous bar Sloppy Joe's, and traveled occasionally to Spain, gathering material for Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing.
Death in the Afternoon a book about bullfighting, was published in 1932. Hemingway had become a bullfighting aficionado after seeing the Pamplona fiesta of 1925, fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway extensively discussed the metaphysics of bullfighting: the ritualized, almost religious practice. In his writings on Spain he was influenced by the Spanish master Pío Baroja (when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he traveled to see Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him that he thought Baroja deserved the prize more than him).
A safari in the fall of 1932 led him to Mombasa, Nairobi, and Machakos in the Mua Hills. In Spain reporting on the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway broke friendship with John Dos Passos because Dos Passos kept reporting despite warning on the atrocities, not only of the Fascists who Hemingway disliked, but also of the Republicans who Hemingway favored ("The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles" by Stephen Koch, published 2005 ISBN 1582432805) and The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh Thomas). Hemingway also began to question his Catholicism at this time, eventually leaving the church (though friends indicate that he had "funny ties" to Catholicism for the rest of his life). The story "The Denunciation" [10] seems autobiographical, thus suggesting that the author might have been an informant for the Republic as well as weapons instructor (The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh Thomas). 1935 saw the publication of Green Hills of Africa, an account of his African safari. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were the fictionalized results of his African experiences.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939. For Whom The Bell Tolls was published shortly after, in 1940. Based on real events, the novel follows three days in the life of Robert Jordan, an American dynamiter fighting with Spanish guerrillas on the side of the Republicans. Jordan is one of Hemingway's characteristic antiheroes: a drifter with no sense of belonging, he finds himself fighting in Spain more out of boredom than out of any allegiance to ideology. The novel begins with Jordan setting out on another mission to dynamite a bridge so as to prevent the Nationalist Army from taking the city of Madrid. When he encounters the Spanish rebels he is supposed to assist, however, a change occurs within him. Befriending the old man Anselmo and the boisterous matriarch Pilar, and falling in love with the beautiful young Maria, Jordan at last finds a sense of place and purposeamongst the doomed Spaniards. It is one of Hemingway's most notable accomplishments.
World War II and its aftermath
The United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941, and for the first time in his life, Hemingway is known to have taken an active part in a war.
Aboard the Pilar, now a Q-Ship, Hemingway's crew was charged with sinking Nazi submarines threatening the shipping of the coasts of Cuba and the United States, though there were actually far more professional and successful activities carried out by the US and Cuban navies (Hemingway's ex-wife Martha always viewed the sub-hunting as an excuse for Hemingway and his friends to get gas and booze for fishing). As the FBI took over Caribbean counter-espionage (Hoover was suspicious of Hemingway from the start), Ernest went to Europe as a war correspondent for Collier's magazine.
Now weighing nearly 260 pounds, Hemingway took part in the D-Day invasion of France as a correspondent on a landing craft, coming in on the 9th wave after most of the action was done (he was infuriated by the fact that then-wife Martha had managed to get in earlier). Later, at Villedieu-les-Poêles, France, he threw three grenades into a cellar where SS officers were hiding. It was the first time he had killed a man. Seemingly encouraged, he declared he would become an unofficial intelligence unit. Later, he acted as an unofficial liaison officer at Château de Rambouillet, and afterwards, formed his own partisan group which took part in the liberation of Paris, France (these claims have been mostly debunked by historians; friends always said that the only thing Hemingway liberated was the bar!). Some have argued that Hemingway was trying to emulate the characters he had created in his fiction.
After the war, Hemingway started work on The Garden of Eden, which was never finished and would be published posthumously in much abridged form in 1986. At one stage, he planned a major trilogy which was to be comprised of "The Sea When Young", "The Sea When Absent" and "The Sea in Being" (the latter eventually published in 1953 as The Old Man and the Sea). There was also a "Sea-Chase" story; three of these pieces were edited and stuck together as the posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream (1970).
Newly divorced from Martha, Hemingway married Mary Welsh, whom he'd met in Europe. Hemingway's first novel after For Whom the Bell Tolls was Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), set in World War II Venice. He derived the title from the last words of General Stonewall Jackson. Enamored of a young Italian girl (Adriana Ivancich at the time, Across the River and Into the Trees is a romance between a war-weary Colonel Cantwell (obviously based on Hemingway) and the young Renata (which means "Reborn" in Latin; obviously based on Adriana). The novel received poor reviews, many of which accused Hemingway of bad taste, stylistic ineptitude and sentimentality. Perhaps the last charge was most true, and fit an emerging pattern: Hemingway was growing old.
Later years
One section of the above-mentioned sea trilogy was published as The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. That novella's enormous success satisfied and fulfilled Hemingway, probably for the last time in his life. It earned him both the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and restored his international reputation.
Then, his legendary bad luck struck once again; on a safari he suffered injuries in two successive plane crashes. Hemingway's injuries were serious; he sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg, had a grave concussion, temporarily lost vision in his left eye (and the hearing in his left ear), had paralysis of the sphincter, a crushed vertebra, ruptured liver, spleen and kidney, and first degree burns on his face, arms, and leg.
As if this were not enough, he was badly injured one month later in a bushfire accident which left him with second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. The pain left him in prolonged anguish, and he was unable to travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize.
A glimmer of hope came with the discovery of some of his old manuscripts from 1928 in the Ritz cellars, which were transformed into A Moveable Feast. Although some of his energy seemed to be restored, severe drinking problems kept him down. His blood pressure and cholesterol count were perilously high, he suffered from aortal inflammation, and his depression, aggravated by alcoholism, was worsening.
He also lost his Finca Vigía, his estate outside Havana, Cuba that he had owned for over twenty years, and was forced to "exile" to Ketchum, Idaho, when the situation in Cuba began to escalate. The famous photograph of Fidel Castro and Hemingway, nominally related to a fishing competition which Castro won, is believed to document a conversation in which Hemingway begged for the return of his estate and Castro ignored him.
His very last years, 1960 and 1961, were marked by severe paranoia. He feared FBI agents would be after him if Cuba turned to the Russians, that the "Feds" (Burgess (9.), p. ??) would be checking his bank account, and that they wanted to arrest him for gross immorality and carrying alcohol. The FBI was in fact surveying Hemingway due to his activities in Cuba.
On 26 February 1960, Ernest Hemingway was not able to get his novel The Dangerous Summer to the publishers. Therefore, he had his wife, Mary summon his friend, LIFE Magazine Bureau Head, Will Lang Jr. to leave Paris and come to Spain. Hemingway persuaded Will Lang Jr. to let him print the manuscript, along with a picture layout before it came out in hardcover. Although not a word of it was on paper, Ernest agreed to the proposal. The first part of story appeared in LIFE Magazine on September 5, 1960. The other installments were printed on the following issues of LIFE.
Hemingway was upset by perfectly normal photographs in his The Dangerous Summer article. He was receiving treatment in Ketchum, Idaho for high blood pressure and liver problems—and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression and his continued paranoia. He lost weight, and his 6-foot frame appeared guant at 170 pounds.
Hemingway was friendly with the World War II British General Eric Dorman-Smith, who was a godfather to one of his children.
Death
Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received ECT treatment again, but this was unable to prevent his suicide on the morning of July 2, 1961 as a result of a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head at the age of 61. He was buried in a service led by a Catholic priest. Prior to his suicide, Hemingway is known to have blamed the loss of his memory on ECT (biographer Jeffrey Meyers agrees).
Many members of Hemingway's immediate family also committed suicide, including his father, Clarence Hemingway, and his siblings Ursula and Leicester. It is believed that some members of Hemingway's paternal line had a genetic condition or hereditary disease known as haemochromatosis, in which an excess of iron concentration in the blood causes damage to the pancreas and depression or instability in the cerebrum. Hemingway's physician father is known to have developed bronze diabetes due to this condition in the years prior to his suicide at age fifty-nine. It is also thought that Hemingway suffered from bi-polar disease, which he self-medicated with alcohol.
Hemingway is said to have donated his entire Cuban estate to Fidel Castro. However, considering that Castro confiscated all US property, it is widely believed that Castro took La Vigia estate, and that the famous photograph of Castro and Hemingway relates to an attempt of Hemingway to recover his property. Regardless, Hemingway did not stay on the Island and never returned to Cuba. He is interred in the Ketchum Cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho. The local public elementary school there is named in his honor. In 1996, his granddaughter, actress Margaux Hemingway, took her own life with a drug overdose; she is interred in the same cemetery.
Posthumous publications
Hemingway was still writing new works up to the time of his death in 1961. All of these unfinished works which were Hemingway's sole creation have been published posthumously; they are Islands in the Stream, The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden[11]. In a note forwarding "Islands in the Stream" Mary Hemingway indicated that she worked with Charles Scribner, Jr. on "preparing this book for publication from Ernest's original manuscript." In that note she stated that "beyond the routine chores of correcting spelling and punctuation, we made some cuts in the manuscript, I feeling that Ernest would surely have made them himself. The book is all Ernest's. We have added nothing to it." Controversy has surrounded the publication of these works, insofar as it has been suggested that it is not necessarily within the jurisdiction of Hemingway's relatives or publishers to determine whether these works should be made available to the public. For example, scholars often disapprovingly note that the version of The Garden of Eden published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1986, though in no way a revision of Hemingway's original words, nonetheless does not include some two-thirds of the original manuscript[12]. In 1999, another novel entitled True at First Light appeared under the name of Ernest Hemingway, though it was heavily edited by his son Patrick Hemingway.
The Associated Press reported in February 2005 on the progress of what is purported to be the final work to be posthumously published that was written by Hemingway. Entitled Under Kilimanjaro, the novel is a fictional account of Hemingway's final African safari in 1953–1954. He spent several months in Kenya with his fourth wife, Mary, before his near-fatal plane crashes took place[13]. Anticipation of the novel, whose manuscript was completed in 1956, adumbrates perhaps an unprecedentedly large critical battle over whether it is proper to publish the work (many sources mention that a new, light side of Hemingway will be seen as opposed to his canonical, macho image[14]), even as editors Robert W. Lewis of University of North Dakota and Robert E. Fleming of University of New Mexico have pushed it through to publication; the novel was published on September 15 2005.
Also published after Hemingway's death were several collections of his work as a journalist. These collections contain his columns and articles for Esquire Magazine, The North American Newspaper Alliance, and the Toronto Star; they include Byline: Ernest Hemingway edited by William White, and Hemingway: The Wild Years edied by Gene Z. Hanrahan.
Influence and legacy
The influence of Hemingway's writings on American literature was considerable and continues to exist today. Indeed, the influence of Hemingway's style was so widespread that it may be glimpsed in most contemporary fiction, as writers draw inspiration either from Hemingway himself or indirectly through writers who more consciously emulated Hemingway's style. In his own time, Hemingway affected writers within his modernist literary circle. James Joyce called "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" "one of the best stories ever written". Pulp fiction and "hard boiled" crime fiction (which flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s) often owed a strong debt to Hemingway.
Hemingway's terse prose style is known to have inspired Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and many Generation X writers. Hemingway's style also influenced Jack Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers. J.D. Salinger is said to have wanted to be a great American short story writer in the same vein as Hemingway.
In Latin American literature, Hemingway's impact can perhaps best be seen in the work of Gabriel García Márquez, who, for instance, often uses the sea as a central image in his fiction.
Science fiction novelist Joe Haldeman won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for his novella, The Hemingway Hoax, a story which explored the effect that Hemingway's lost stories might have had upon 20th century history.
In 1999, Michael Palin retraces the footsteps of Hemingway, one hundred years after his birth of his favorite writer. The journey takes him through many sites that were frequented by Hemingway. The sites included Chicago, Paris, Italy, Africa, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho. This results into a book and a television documentary: Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure, which can be completely read, at no charge, at his website.
At this writing, only one of Hemingway's sons (Patrick) survives.
Awards and honors
During his lifetime Hemingway was awarded with:
- Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) in World War I
- Bronze Star (War Correspondent-Military Irregular in World War II) in 1947
- Pulitzer Prize in 1953 (for The Old Man and the Sea)
- Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 (The Old Man and the Sea cited as a reason for the award)
Trivia
Sailors were long-known to especially value polydactyl cats (which have extra toes as a genetic trait) for their extraordinary climbing and hunting abilities as an aid in controlling shipboard rodents. Some sailors also considered them to be extremely good luck when at sea. Hemingway was one of the more famous lovers of polydactyl cats. He was first given a six-toed cat by a ship's captain. As provided in his will, his former home in Key West, Florida (which is now a popular museum) currently houses approximately sixty descendents of his cats, approximately 50% of whom are polydactyl.
Works
Novels
- (1925) The Torrents of Spring
- (1926) The Sun Also Rises
- (1929) A Farewell to Arms
- (1937) To Have and Have Not
- (1940) For Whom the Bell Tolls
- (1950) Across the River and Into the Trees
- (1952) The Old Man and the Sea
- (1962) Adventures of a Young Man
- (1970) Islands in the Stream (Hemingway)
- (1986) The Garden of Eden
- (1999) True at First Light
- (2005) Under Kilimanjaro
Nonfiction
- (1932) Death in the Afternoon
- (1935) Green Hills of Africa
- (1960) The Dangerous Summer
- (1964) A Moveable Feast
Short story collections
- (1923) Three Stories and Ten Poems
- (1925) In Our Time
- (1927) Men Without Women
- (1932) The Snows of Kilimanjaro
- (1933) Winner Take Nothing
- (1938) The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories
- (1947) The Essential Hemingway
- (1953) The Hemingway Reader
- (1972) The Nick Adams Stories
- (1976) The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
- (1995) Collected Stories
Film
- (1937) The Spanish Earth
- (1962) Adventures Of A Young Man is based on Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. (also known as Hemingway's Adventures Of A Young Man.)
Notes
- ^ From Childhood at The Hemingway Resource Center.
- ^ Three different sources disagree on how long this habit of his mother's lasted. A note from a PBS lecture series states that it lasted for two years; Grauer claims she stopped when he was 6; Juan's analysis suggests that her treatment continued "well into his teens;" he also claims that at times she would attempt to liken Hemingway to his older sister Marcelline.
- ^ A large list of such anecdotes are compiled at the centennial commemoration page of the Kansas City Star.
- ^ Burgess, 1978, p. 24.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ On August 10, 1943, Hemingway typed a letter to Archibald MacLeish discussing Pound's mental health and other literary matters.
- ^ In a conversation with John Peale Bishop, quoted in Hemingway, Cowley, ed, 1944, p. xiii.
- ^ Burgess, 1978, p. 57.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Information about these posthumous Hemingway works was taken from Charles Scribner, Jr.'s 1987 Preface to The Garden of Eden.
- ^ BookRags makes this quantitative note; it also reveals some more information about the publication of The Garden of Eden and offers some discussion of thematic content.
- ^ The Kent State University Press is the official source for this new novel's release.
- ^ See the University of North Dakota feature of editor Robert W. Lewis, for example.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Berridge, H.R. (1990). Barron's Book Notes on Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Stuttgart: Klett. ISBN 0812034120.
- Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691013055.
- Baker, Carlos, ed (1962). Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0684411571.
- Biography. The Hemingway Resource Center. URL accessed on April 12, 2005.
- Burgess, Anthony (1978). Ernest Hemingway and His World. Norwich: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0684185040.
- Hemingway, Ernest, Carlos Baker, ed (1981). Selected Letters 1917-1961. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0743246896.
- Hemingway, Ernest, Malcolm Cowley, ed (1944). Hemingway (The Viking Portable Library). New York: The Viking Press. ASIN B0007DNS9K.
- Koch, Stephen (2005). The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles. New York: Counterpoint Press. ISBN 1582432805.
- Lynn, Kenneth Schuyler (1995). Hemingway. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674387325.
- Young, Philip (1952). Ernest Hemingway. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. ISBN 0816601917.
| Preceded by: Sir Winston Churchill |
Nobel Prize in Literature winner 1954 |
Succeeded by: Halldór Laxness |
Further reading
External links
- Timeless Hemingway
- One True Sentence: A Blog Devoted to EH
- Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure Based on a PBS lecture series narrated by Michael Palin.
- The Hemingway Society
- CNN: A Hemingway Retrospective
- Ernest Hemingway One Man Show
- Review of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
- Review of The Sun Also Rises
- SparkNotes of The Old Man And The Sea
- Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida, official website
- Hemingway on Stage
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