Hemingway, Ernest 1899-1961

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST 1899-1961

Writer

The Writer as Celebrity

Ernest Hemingway became America's most famous and recognizable writer, combining literary genius with a life of action. He may have been more widely celebrated as a sportsman, warrior, traveler, and drinker than as a literary figure. It has been frequently remarked that Hemingway's greatest fictional character was Hemingway.

Early Fame

The elder son in the large family of a devout doctor and a music teacher, Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, summering at Walloon Lake in northern Michigan. Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, was prosperous and puritanical. In Michigan Hemingway found the material for his early fiction: events of sudden tragedy and pathos endured by the local Indians; the life-and-death consciousness of the hunter and fisherman; and the adept participant and empathic witness that he discovered in himself. Hemingway did not attend college. After graduating from high school in 1917, he worked for a brief time as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star before joining the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. During World War I Hemingway was wounded while serving on the Italian front. Married in 1921 to Hadley, the first of his four wives, assisted by the income of her trust fund, and encouraged by Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway returned to Europe as a correspondent for the Toronto Star with the intention of becoming a writer of fiction. In Paris he formed useful friendships with expatriate writers Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Archibald MacLeish and with editors Ernest Walsh and Ford Madox Ford of, respectively, This Quarter and Transatlantic Review. Hemingway's resentment of the help he received found vent in insult—frequently in print; almost all of his literary friendships were eventually soured or destroyed. Hemingway's first book published in America, a short-story collection titled In Our Time (1925), like his two earlier collections of short pieces published in Paris, made use of heretofore nonliterary material: fishing and camping and bullfighting. After his Paris apprenticeship Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926. This well-received work about expatriates in Paris and the fiesta at Pamplona, Spain, formulated the Hemingway code of values and developed his recognizable style, utilizing detailed descriptions, clipped dialogue, inside dope, and simple sentences. The novel also provided a name for the aimless, postwar expatriates: the Lost Generation. The Sun Also Rises was followed in 1929 by A Farewell to Arms, an even more successful novel set in Italy during World War I. It recounts the love affair between an American ambulance driver, Frederic Henry, and an English nurse, Catherine Barclay, against the backdrop of the Italian retreat from Caporetto in 1917. The work was judged obscene by some readers. Hemingway also wrote some fifty stories, which included such widely anthologized and imitated classics as "The Killers," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and "Big Two-Hearted River."

Sport and War as Literature

In 1928 Hemingway settled in Key West, Florida, living there until 1940 when he moved to Cuba. During the 1930s Hemingway wrote nonfiction books about bullfighting (Death in the Afternoon, 1932) and big-game hunting (Green Hills of Africa, 1935). Hemingway seemed to spend more time fishing in Cuba or hunting in Wyoming or Montana than writing. Hemingway's exploits and tumultuous personal life made him good copy for newspapers and magazines. Accounts of his four marriages and fights with people like Morley Callaghan, Wallace Stevens, and Max Eastman placed his name and picture more often in gossip than in literary columns. Hemingway's critical standing and readership slipped during the 1930s. His activities as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War produced For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), which restored his reputation as a novelist. The novel describes a bridge-blowing operation behind Fascist lines by an American Spanish teacher, Robert Jordan, and a group of Loyalist partisans. It had the best reviews of any Hemingway work since A Farewell to Arms and sold over 500,000 copies. During World War II Hemingway was again a correspondent but published no important fiction about this war. When it seemed that Hemingway was finished as a fiction writer, he achieved a comeback in 1952 with The Old Man and the Sea, an allegorical account of an old Cuban fisherman's fight with and eventual loss of a giant marlin. The novelette, which was first published in Life, helped secure for him the Nobel Prize in 1954.

Endearing Reputation

Suffering from hypertension and depression, Hemingway shot himself at his Ketchum, Idaho, home in 1961. At his death he left a large collection of unfinished writings, some of which have been edited and published by his estate. These include A Moveable Feast (1964), his reminiscences about Paris in the 1920s. Although his personal legend inevitably diminished after his death, Ernest Hemingway influenced more readers, nonreaders, and other writers than any other American writer.

Sources:

Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribners, 1969);

John Raeburn, Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).