Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961), writer, novelist, Nobel Prize recipient.Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway completed high school and then worked briefly as a reporter on the
Kansas City Star before enlisting as a Red Cross ambulance driver in
World War I. On 8 July 1918, in northern Italy, he was seriously wounded by a mortar shell. After the war he recuperated in northern Michigan, and wrote freelance stories for the
Toronto Star. In December 1921, he and Hadley Richardson (the first of his four wives) arrived in Paris where he continued to write for the Toronto Star. A charter member of what the expatriate American writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) dubbed the
Lost Generation, Hemingway connected with Stein, Ezra
Pound, and Sylvia Beach, owner of a Paris bookstore and publisher of avant‐garde literature. Through them he became closely associated with such Modernist writers and artists as Ford Madox Ford, Juan Gris, Joan Miro, and James Joyce. By 1924, while working on the
Transatlantic Review, Hemingway was writing now‐classic short stories, including
Big Two‐Hearted River, published in
In Our Time (1925). With the help of F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Hemingway signed with Charles Scribner's Sons, who published all of his post‐1925 work. Maxwell Perkins, until his death in 1947, was his editor.
Hemingway's first two novels,
The Sun Also Rises (1926) and
A Farewell to Arms (1929), expressing the disillusionment of the era, moved him to the forefront of postwar American writers. He reached a mass audience with
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a politically engaged novel about the Spanish Civil War. While experimenting with nonfiction and drama, he continued to write short stories like
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and
The Snows of Kilimanjaro. In 1952, he published
The Old Man and the Sea, a lesser work that nevertheless brought him the Nobel Prize in 1954.
Marlin fisherman, big‐game hunter, bull‐fight aficionado, and war reporter, Hemingway's public persona seemed to mirror his macho fiction. Behind the scenes, however, increasingly severe depression and paranoia led to his suicide on 2 July 1961. Three novels, a memoir, and one nonfiction book appeared posthumously. The most influential American writer of his generation, Hemingway enlarged the subject matter of American fiction; developed a distinctive, pared‐down prose style; and changed the voice and structure of the short story.
See also
Literature: Since World War I;
Modernist Culture;
Red Cross, American;
Twenties, The.
Bibliography
Carlos Baker , Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 1969.
Bernice Kert , The Hemingway Women, 1983.
Michael Reynolds , The Young Hemingway, 1986.
Michael Reynolds , Hemingway: The Paris Years, 1989.
Michael Reynolds , Hemingway: The 1930s, 1997.
Michael Reynolds , Hemingway: The Final Years, 1999.
Michael Reynolds