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

A baby picture, c. 1900

Hemingway was born at 8:00 A.M. on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, the firstborn son of six children to Clarence ("Doctor Ed") and Grace Hemingwa. His mother was domineering and devoutly religious, mirroring the strict Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had "wide lawns and narrow minds"^[1]. 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. Summering in a house called Windemere on Michigan's Walloon Lake, Hemingway's early experiences in close contact with nature would instill in him a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure and for living in areas of the world generally considered remote or isolated.

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"^[2].

World War I until the Spanish Civil War

File:Hemingway WorldWarIYoung.gif

A young Hemingway in his World War I uniform

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 cruel encounter with human death left him shaken. The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror; 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^[3].

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

In 1921, Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. They decided to live abroad for a time, and, at the advice of Sherwood Anderson, settled, along with Morley Callaghan and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Paris; there Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the Toronto 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.

File:Stein by picasso.jpg

Gertrude Stein (pictured here in a portrait by Pablo Picasso) was a long-time mentor of Hemingway and served as an important influence on his style and literary development.

Hemingway's American debut in literature, however, 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. It is the tale of a man, Nick Adams, who goes out camping along a river to fish, while at the same time suffering flashbacks to traumatic, war-time memories.

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^[4], 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^[5].

During his time in Montparnasse, in just over 6 weeks, he wrote his second novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). The novel, following a semi-autobiographical 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.

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 tragically doomed romance between Frederic Henry, an American soldier in convalescence, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The novel is heavily autobiographical: 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.

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 overwhelming 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.

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" [6] 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, Ernest went to Europe as a war correspondent for Collier's magazine.

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).

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 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 Ivanich, a woman Hemingway was at that time infatuated with). 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.

The Old Man and the Sea

In 1952, The Old Man and the Sea was published. Often cited as his greatest work, the 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.

It is the story of an aging Cuban fisherman, who sets off to fish for one last time despite his advancing age and the obsolescence of his profession. The narrative proceeds rapidly using Hemingway's characteristic understatement to great effect, to the point where the reader loses all sense of reading a fiction and feels instead as if they themselves are at sea. The fisherman encounters an enormous fish. Although he catches it, it nearly kills him and nearly wrecks his boat. As he proceeds back to shore, schools of barracuda eat away at the body of the fish, so that by the time he returns the only thing the old man has to show for his struggle is the enormous fish's skeleton, bone dry.

Later years and Death

Riding high on the success of his last greatest novel, Hemingway's notorious 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.

Consumed with depression about these and other problems, Hemingway committed 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.

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 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.

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)

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

1. ^  From Childhood at The Hemingway Resource Center.
2. ^  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.
3. ^  A large list of such anecdotes are compiled at the centennial commemoration page of the Kansas City Star.
4. ^  Burgess, 1978, p. 24.
5. ^  Ibid.
6. ^  On August 10, 1943, Hemingway typed a letter to Archibald MacLeish discussing Pound's mental health and other literary matters.
7. ^  In a conversation with John Peale Bishop, quoted in Hemingway, Cowley, ed, 1944, p. xiii.
8. ^  Burgess, 1978, p. 57.
9. ^  Ibid.
10. ^  Information about these posthumous Hemingway works was taken from Charles Scribner, Jr.'s 1987 Preface to The Garden of Eden.
11. ^  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.
12. ^  The Kent State University Press is the official source for this new novel's release.
13. ^  See the University of North Dakota feature of editor Robert W. Lewis, for example.

References

ISBN 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.
• 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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