Ernest Miller Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1898-1961), American Nobel Prize-winning author, was one of the most celebrated and influential literary stylists of the 20th century.

Ernest Hemingway was a legend in his own life-time— in a sense, a legend of his own making. He worked hard at being a composite of all the manly attributes he gave to his fictional heroes—a hard drinker, big-game hunter, fearless soldier, amateur boxer, and bullfight aficionado. Because the man and his fiction often seemed indistinguishable, critics have had difficulty judging his work objectively. His protagonists—virile and laconic—have been extravagantly praised and vehemently denounced. In his obsession with violence and death, the Hemingway creation has been rivaled only by the Byronic myth of the 19th century. Despite sensational publicity and personal invective, Hemingway now ranks among America's great writers. His critical stature rests solidly upon a small body of exceptional writing, distinguished for its stylistic purity, emotional veracity, moral integrity, and dramatic intensity of vision.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Ill., on July 21, 1898. His father was a country physician, who taught his son hunting and fishing; his mother was a religiously puritanical woman, active in church affairs, who led her boy to play the cello and sing in the choir. Hemingway's early years were spent largely in combating the repressive feminine influence of his mother and nurturing the masculine influence of his father. He spent the summers with his family in the woods of northern Michigan, where he often accompanied his father on professional calls. The discovery of his father's apparent cowardice, later depicted in the short story "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," and his suicide several years later left the boy with an emotional scar.

Despite the intense pleasure Hemingway derived from outdoor life, and his popularity in high school—where he distinguished himself as a scholar and athlete—he ran away from home twice. However, his first real chance for escape came in 1917, when the United States entered World War I. He volunteered for active service in the infantry but was rejected because of eye trouble.

After spending several months as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, Hemingway enlisted in the Red Cross medical service, driving an ambulance on the Italian front. He was badly wounded in the knee at Fossalta di Piave; yet, still under heavy mortar fire, he carried a wounded man on his back a considerable distance to the aid station. After having over 200 shell fragments removed from his legs and body, Hemingway next enlisted in the Italian infantry, served on the Austrian front until the armistice, and was decorated for bravery by the Italian government.

Learning His Trade

Shortly after the war Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent in the Near East for the Toronto Star. When he returned to Michigan, he had already decided to commit himself to fiction writing. His excellent journalism and the publication in magazines of several experimental short stories had impressed the well-known author Sherwood Anderson, who, when Hemingway decided to return to Europe, gave him letters of introduction to expatriates Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Hemingway and his bride, Hadley Richardson, journeyed to Paris, where he served his literary apprenticeship under these two prominent authors. Despite the abject poverty in which he and his wife lived, these were the happiest years of Hemingway's life, as well as the most artistically fruitful.

In 1923 Hemingway published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. The poems are insignificant, but the stories give strong indication of his emerging genius. "Out of Season" already contains the psychological tension and moral ambivalence characteristic of his mature work. With In Our Time (1925) Hemingway's years of apprenticeship ended. In this collection of stories, he drew on his experiences while summering in Michigan to depict the initiation into the world of pain and violence of young Nick Adams, a prototype for later Hemingway heroes. The atrocities he had witnessed as a journalist in the Near East became the brief vignettes about intense suffering that formed inter chapters for the collection. One story, "Indian Camp," which sets the tone for the entire volume, has Nick accompanying his father, Dr. Adams, on a call during which the physician performs a caesarean operation with no anesthetic. They discover afterward that the squaw's husband, unable to bear his wife's screams, has killed himself by nearly severing his head with a razor. The story is written in Hemingway's characteristically terse, economic prose. "The End of Something" and "The Three Day Blow" deal with Nick's disturbed reaction to the end of a love affair. "The Big Two hearted River" describes a young man just returned from war and his desperate attempt to prevent mental breakdown.

Major Novels

Hemingway returned to the United States in 1926 with the manuscripts of two novels and several short stories. The Torrents of Spring (1926), a parody of Sherwood Anderson, was written very quickly, largely for the purpose of breaking his contract with Boni and Liveright, who was also Anderson's publisher. That May, Scribner's issued Hemingway's second novel, The Sun Also Rises. This novel, the major statement of the "lost generation," describes a group of expatriate Americans and Englishmen, all of whom have suffered physically and emotionally during the war; their aimless existence vividly expresses the spiritual bankruptcy and moral atrophy of an entire generation. Hemingway's second volume of short stories, Men without Women (1927), contains "The Killers," about a man who refuses to run from gangsters determined to kill him; "The Light of the World," dealing with Nick Adams's premature introduction to the sickening world of prostitution and homosexuality; and "The Undefeated," concerning an aging bullfighter whose courage and dedication constitute a moral victory in the face of physical defeat and death.

In December 1929 A Farewell to Arms was published. This novel tells the story of a tragically terminated love affair between an American soldier and an English nurse, starkly silhouetted against the bleakness of war and a collapsing world order. It contains a philosophical expression of the Hemingway code of stoical endurance in a violent age: "The world breaks everyone," reflects the protagonist, "and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that it will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of those you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry."

Hemingway revealed his passionate interest in bull-fighting in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a humorous and inventive nonfiction study. In 1933 Scribner's published his final collection of short stories, Winner Take Nothing. This volume, containing his most bitter and disillusioned writing, deals almost exclusively with emotional breakdown, impotence, and homosexuality.

Hemingway's African safari in 1934 provided the material for another nonfiction work, The Green Hills of Africa (1935), as well as two of his finest short stories, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Both stories concern attainment of self-realization and moral integrity through contact with fear and death.

Hemingway wrote To Have and Have Not (1937) in response to the 1930s depression. The novel, inadequately conceived and poorly executed, deals with a Florida smuggler whose illegal activities and frequent brutalities mask his sense of ethics and strength of character. Mortally wounded by the gangsters with whom he has been dealing, the individualistic hero comes to the startling realization that "One man alone ain't got no—chance."

The chief political catalyst in Hemingway's life was the Spanish Civil War. In 1936 he had returned to Spain as a newspaper reporter and participated in raising funds for the Spanish Republic until the war's end in 1939. In 1937 he collaborated on the documentary film The Spanish Earth. Hemingway's only writing during this period was a play, The Fifth Column (1936; produced in New York in 1940), a sincere but dramatically ineffective attempt to portray the conditions prevailing during the siege of Madrid.

Seventeen months after that war ended, Hemingway completed For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). His most ambitious novel, it describes an American professor's involvement with a loyalist guerrilla band and his brief, idyllic love affair with a Spanish girl. A vivid, intelligently conceived narrative, it is written in less lyrical and more dramatic prose than his earlier work. Hemingway deliberately avoided having the book used as propaganda, despite its strained attempt at an affirmative resolution, by carefully balancing fascist atrocities with a heartless massacre by a peasant mob.

World War II

Following the critical and popular success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway lapsed into a literary silence that lasted a full decade and was largely the result of his strenuous, frequently reckless, activities during World War II. In 1942 as a Collier's correspondent with the 3d Army, he witnessed some of the bloodiest battles in Europe. Although he served in no official capacity, he commanded a personal battalion of over 200 troops and was granted the respect and privileges normally accorded a general. At this time he received the affectionate appellation of "Papa" from his admirers, both military and literary.

In 1944 while in London, Hemingway met and soon married Mary Welsh, a Time reporter. His three previous marriages—to Hadley Richardson, mother of one son; to Pauline Pfeiffer, mother of his second and third sons; and to Martha Gelhorn—had all ended in divorce. Following the war, Hemingway and his wife purchased a home, Finca Vigia, near Havana, Cuba. Hemingway's only literary work was some anecdotal articles for Esquire; the remainder of his time was spent fishing, hunting, battling critics, and providing copy for gossip columnists. In 1950 he ended his literary silence with Across the River and into the Trees, a narrative, flawed by maudlin self-pity, about a retired Army colonel dying of a heart condition in Venice and his dreamy love affair with a pubescent girl.

Last Works

Hemingway's remarkable gift for recovery once again asserted itself in 1952 with the appearance of a novella about an extraordinary battle between a tired old Cuban fisherman and a giant marlin. The Old Man and the Sea, immediately hailed a masterpiece, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Although lacking the emotional tensions of his longer works, this novella possesses a generosity of spirit and reverence for life which make it an appropriate conclusion for Hemingway's career. In 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Hemingway's rapidly deteriorating physical condition and an increasingly severe psychological disturbance drastically curtailed his literary capabilities in the last years of his life. A nostalgic journey to Africa planned by the author and his wife in 1954 ended in their plane crash over the Belgian Congo. Hemingway suffered severe burns and internal injuries from which he never fully recovered. Additional strain occurred when the revolutionary Cuban government of Fidel Castro forced the Hemingways to leave Finca Vigía. After only a few months in their new home in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway was admitted to the Mayo Clinic to be treated for hypertension and emotional depression and was later treated by electroshock therapy. Scornful of an illness which humiliated him physically and impaired his writing, he killed himself with a shotgun on July 2, 1961.

Shortly after Hemingway's death, literary critic Malcolm Cowley and scholar Carlos Baker were entrusted with the task of going through the writer's remaining manuscripts to decide what material might be publishable. The first posthumous work, A Moveable Feast (1964), is an elegiac reminiscence of Hemingway's early years in Paris, containing some fine writing as well as brilliant vignettes of his famous contemporaries. A year later the Atlantic Monthly published a few insignificant short stories and two long, rambling poems. In 1967 William White edited a collection of Hemingway's best journalism under the title By-Line Ernest Hemingway.

Further Reading

The authorized biography of Hemingway is Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969). A controversial portrait is A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (1966). Among the major full-length critical studies are Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1952; 3d rev. ed. 1963), a textual study with emphasis on structure and symbolism; Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway (1952; rev. ed. 1966); Earl Rovit, Ernest Hemingway (1963); Richard B. Hovey, Hemingway: The Inward Terrain (1968); and Leo Gurko's more general Ernest Hemingway and the Pursuit of Heroism (1968).

The most valuable early critical essays on Hemingway are Edmund Wilson, "Hemingway: Gauge of Morale," in Wound and the Bow (1941); Robert Penn Warren, "Ernest Hemingway," in Selected Essays (1958); and Malcolm Cowley, "Nightmare and Ritual in Hemingway," reprinted in Robert Percy Weeks, ed., Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays (1962). The two major critical collections are John K. McCaffery, ed., Ernest Hemingway: The Man and His Work (1950), and Carlos Baker, ed., Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthology (1961). See also the relevant sections in Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction, 1920-1940 (1941); Edwin Berry Burgum, The Novel and the World's Dilemma (1947); Wilbur M. Frohock, The Novel of Violence in America, 1920-1950 (1950; 2d rev. ed. 1958); Frederick J. Hoffman, The Modern Novel in America, 1900-1950 (1951); and Ray B. West, The Short Story in America, 1900-1950 (1952). □

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST 1899-1961

Writer

Celebrity

No literary figure during the 1950s, or any other decade in American history, achieved a degree of literary celebrity equal to that of Ernest Hemingway. Tough, experienced, independent-minded, action-seeking, hard-drinking, and photogenic, he rep-resented the full romance of authorship for readers of the time.

Fading Reputation

To many literary critics, though, he seemed through as a writer at the beginning of the decade, and if there was any suspicion that he still might have a spark of creative genius left, his novel Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) dispelled it. He had, it seemed, entered the phase of his life given over to accepting awards for past achievements.

The Old Man and the Sea.

Then came The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Hemingway's twenty-seven-thousand-word short novel (one-third to one-half the length of the average novel) about an old fisherman struggling against bad times. It is arguable that more readers were exposed to The Old Man and the Sea in the month of its publication than any novel ever before. Life magazine devoted twenty pages of its 1 September issue to publication of the full text one week before book publication; 5 million copies of the magazine were printed in anticipation of the unusual interest Hemingway's new work would attract. The Book-of-the-Month Club chose The Old Man and the Sea as part of a dual feature selection for September 1952 and printed 153,000 copies. Scribners, the trade publisher, published a first printing of 50,000 copies and reprinted frequently, as the novel remained on best-seller lists for a year and a half.

Critical Response

Critics competed with one another to offer the highest praise to Hemingway and his work. Mark Schorer, a professor of English, novelist, short-story writer, and regular reviewer in the New York Times Book Review, expressed the majority view: "Everywhere the book is being called a classic," he wrote, and he went on to proclaim Hemingway "unquestionably the greatest craftsman in the American novel in this century." The novel won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953—Hemingway's first—and reaffirmed his candidacy for the Nobel Prize.

Career Assessment

The Old Man and the Sea was Hemingway's last novel published during his lifetime. It seemed in 1952 that the time had come to assess his achievement. He was approached by an English professor who wanted to write his biography. Hemingway responded angrily and forcefully: "The writing published in books is what I stand on and I would like people to leave my private life the hell alone. What right has anyone to go into it? I say no right at all." Nonetheless, the incident that culminated the Hemingway legend in 1954, the year in which his literary greatness was proclaimed all over the world, had nothing to do with writing.

Report of Death

The year began with the reports of his death. In September 1953 the Hemingways began a five-month, highly publicized African safari, his second. Look magazine sent along a photographer to do a feature story. After the safari was over, the Hemingways were on a three-day sight-seeing tour of the Belgian Congo when their plane crashed on 23 January 1954. They and the pilot crawled to safety, leaving the wreckage behind, but rescue teams that discovered the crash site assumed the worst and informed news sources that the Hemingways had been killed. The next day a river-boat picked up the survivors, and a local pilot agreed to fly them out of the wild. The second plane crashed, too, and this time Hemingway was seriously injured. His skull was fractured, a kidney and his spleen were ruptured, and he suffered burns on his arms and face crawling through burning brush. Newspapers that had failed to carry reports of the first crash now joined those already carrying Hemingway's obituary on the front page. He was declared dead around the world before the error was discovered. Two months later a photo of the solemn writer, head battered, waving his hand so that the scars of the crash were visible, was widely published. He was a hero, declaring his toughness to the world.

Nobel Prize

On his return to the United States in March 1954, Hemingway received the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In July he received the highest honor Cuba could grant, and in November he became the sixth American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Unable to attend the presentation ceremony due to illness, he sent a characteristically terse acceptance statement: "A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it."

Last years

Hemingway's last years were troubled. He was ill—physically and mentally—much of the time. He participated in the filming of The Old Man and the Sea, followed a dramatic series of bullfights in Spain, about which he wrote, and wrote a long account of his trip to Africa, but all his projects of the period were marked by frustration that drove him deeper into depression. By the end of the decade there were undeniable signs of the mental torment that drove him to suicide on 2 July 1961.

Sources:

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

Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway (New York: Harper & Row, 1985);

Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: An Annotated Chronology (Detroit: Manly/Omnigraphics, 1991).

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).

Hemingway, Ernest [Miller] (1899–1961), born in Illinois, while attending school made frequent hunting and fishing expeditions in northern Michigan, which helped condition his later primitivistic attitude. After working as a Kansas City reporter, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in France, then transferred to the Italian infantry until the close of World War I, after which he reported battles in the Near East for the Toronto Star, and settled in Paris as a member of the expatriate group.

Influenced by Ezra Pound and particularly by Gertrude Stein, whose style strongly affected him, he published Three Stories & Ten Poems (Paris, 1923) and In Our Time (U.S., 1925). These early stories already exhibited the attitude of mind and technique for which he later became famous. As the leading spokesman for the “lost generation” he expressed the feelings of a war‐wounded people disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope, and so thoroughly defeated by the collapse of former values that, their atrophied nerves not permitting them to attack their betrayers, they could turn only to a stoic acceptance of primal emotions. The stories are mainly concerned with “tough” people, either intelligent men and women who have dropped into an exhausted cynicism, or such primitives as frontiersmen, Indians, and professional athletes, whose essential courage and honesty are implicitly contrasted with the brutality of civilized society. Emotion is held at arm's length; only the bare happenings are recorded, and emphasis is obtained by understatement and spare dialogue.

After Hemingway returned to New York and wrote the lesser satirical novel The Torrents of Spring (1926), he carried the style and attitude of his short stories into the novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), which tells of the moral collapse of a group of expatriated Americans and Englishmen, broken by the war, who turn toward escape through all possible violent diversions. Success in fictional craftsmanship and in portraying the mind of an era was again achieved in A Farewell to Arms (1929), the poignant love story of an English nurse and an American ambulance lieutenant during the war. Besides further distinguished collections of short stories, Men Without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933), he wrote only two lesser books during the next few years, although his work continued to exercise a great influence on the literature of the period. Death in the Afternoon (1932), a book on bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big‐game hunting with digressions on literary matters, show a further cultivation of the primitive and brutal levels, contrasted with the hollow culture that had cheated his generation.

In To Have and Have Not (1937), Hemingway for the first time showed an interest in a possible solution of social problems through collective action. This attitude continued in newspaper articles from Spain about its civil war, whose espionage was the subject of his realistic play, The Fifth Column, adapted for the stage (1940) by Benjamin Glazer, and printed in The Fifth Column and the First Forty‐Nine Stories (1938), in which appeared two of his finest stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his longest novel, on an incident in the Spanish Civil War, has universality in its thesis that the loss of liberty in one place means a loss everywhere. He edited an anthology, Men at War (1942), but issued no new novel until Across the River and into the Trees (1950), which was considered to show that Hemingway had become bitter and defeatist like his tale's protagonist, an aging colonel. With The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a parable of man against nature in a poignant novelette, he recaptured his critical acclaim, recognized in a Nobel Prize (1954).

In his last years he published nothing, and he had been seriously ill for some time before his death as a suicide by gunshot. However, several posthumous works followed, most notably A Moveable Feast (1964), sketches of his life and acquaintances in Paris, 1921–1926, and Islands in the Stream (1970), a novel in three parts about a painter's unhappy marriage, his affection for his sons, their deaths, his bravery in war, his pleasure in deep‐sea fishing, and his loneliness. Another novel, written in the 1940s, edited and published in 1986, The Garden of Eden, begins with the honeymoon of an enticing young couple, David and Catherine Bourne, he a good writer, she an heiress, who break up over serious sexual differences. Later compilations include The Wild Years (1962), his journalism for the Toronto Star; By‐Lines (1967), selected journalism of four decades; The Nick Adams Stories (1972), eight of them previously unpublished; and three collections of verse, the last and most inclusive being 88 Poems (1979). Selected Letters was issued in 1981.

Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961, American novelist and short-story writer, b. Oak Park, Ill. one of the great American writers of the 20th cent.

Life

The son of a country doctor, Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star after graduating from high school in 1917. During World War I he served as an ambulance driver in France and in the Italian infantry and was wounded just before his 19th birthday. Later, while working in Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, he became involved with the expatriate literary and artistic circle surrounding Gertrude Stein. During the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway served as a correspondent on the loyalist side. He fought in World War II and then settled in Cuba in 1945. In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After his expulsion from Cuba by the Castro regime, he moved to Idaho. He was increasingly plagued by ill health and mental problems, and in July, 1961, he committed suicide by shooting himself.

Work

Hemingway's fiction usually focuses on people living essential, dangerous lives—soldiers, fishermen, athletes, bullfighters—who meet the pain and difficulty of their existence with stoic courage. His celebrated literary style, influenced by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein , is direct, terse, muscular, and often monotonous, yet particularly suited to his elemental subject matter.

Hemingway's first books, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), In Our Time (short stories, 1924), and The Torrents of Spring (a novel, 1926), attracted attention primarily because of his literary style. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises (1926), he was recognized as the spokesman of the "lost generation" (so called by Gertrude Stein). The novel concerns a group of psychologically bruised, disillusioned expatriates living in postwar Paris, who take psychic refuge in such immediate physical activities as eating, drinking, traveling, brawling, and lovemaking.

His next important novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), tells of a tragic wartime love affair between an ambulance driver and an English nurse. Hemingway also published such volumes of short stories as Men without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933), as well as The Fifth Column, a play. His First Forty-nine Stories (1938) includes such famous short stories as "The Killers,""The Undefeated," and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Hemingway's nonfiction works, Death in the Afternoon (1932), about bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), about big-game hunting, glorify virility, bravery, and the virtue of a primal challenge to life.

From his experience in the Spanish Civil War came Hemingway's great novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), which, in detailing an incident in the war, argues for human brotherhood. His novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952) celebrates the indomitable courage of an aged Cuban fisherman. Among Hemingway's other works are the novels To Have and Have Not (1937) and Across the River and into the Trees (1950); he also edited an anthology of stories, Men at War (1942). Posthumous publications include A Moveable Feast (1964, restored ed. 2009), a memoir of Paris in the 1920s; the novels Islands in the Stream (1970) and True at First Light (1999), a safari saga begun in 1954 and edited by his son Patrick; and The Nick Adams Stories (1972), a collection that includes previously unpublished pieces.

Bibliography

See his letters, ed. by C. Baker (1989), by M. J. Bruccoli (1996), and by S. Spanier and R. W. Trogdon (Vol. I, 2011); biographies by C. Baker (1969, rev. ed. 1980), J. Meyers (1986), M. S. Reynolds (5 vol. 1987–99), K. Lynn (1988), and J. R. Mellow (1993); P. Hendrickson's biographical Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961 (2011); B. Vejdovsky and M. Hemingway, Hemingway: A Life in Pictures (2011); P. Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (rev. ed. 1966); C. Baker, Hemingway, the Writer as Artist (4th ed. 1972), H. S. Villard and J. Nagel, Hemingway in Love and War (1989), and J. McLendon, Papa (1990); M. S. Reynolds, Hemingway: An Annotated Chronology (1991).

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

Hemingway, Ernest Miller (1899–1961), American short story writer and novelist. He worked as a reporter and served in 1918 as a volunteer with an ambulance unit on the Italian front, before settling in Paris among the American expatriate literary group, where he met Pound, G. Stein, F. M. Ford, and others described in his posthumously published A Moveable Feast (1964). He made his name with The Sun Also Rises (1926; in England, as Fiesta, 1927), a novel which catches the post-war mood of disillusion of the so-called ‘lost generation’. A Farewell to Arms (1929), the story of a love affair between an American lieutenant and an English nurse during the war on the Italian front, confirmed his position as one of the most influential writers of the time. His collections of short stories Men without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933) are especially notable. His growing dissatisfaction with contemporary culture was shown by his deliberate cultivation of the brutal and the primitive; he celebrated bullfighting in Death in the Afternoon (1932) and big-game hunting in The Green Hills of Africa (1935). He actively supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is set against its background. In his later years he lived mostly in Cuba, where his passion for deep-sea fishing provided the setting for The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954.

Hemingway, Ernest Miller (1899–1961) US writer. After serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, Hemingway became a journalist, first in Paris and later as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), published in the UK as Fiesta (1927), chronicled the Lost Generation and established his reputation. Later works include a non-fiction work about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon (1932), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and the novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Hemingway was also an acclaimed short-story writer. He received the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature.

http://www.hemingway.org