Ernest Hemingway

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, 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), 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) and ed. by M. J. Bruccoli (1996); M. S. Reynolds, Hemingway: An Annotated Chronology (1991); 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. Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (2d ed. 1966); C. Baker, Hemingway, the Writer as Artist (4th ed. 1972), H. S. Villard and J. Nagel, Hemingway in Love and War (1989), J. McLendon, Papa (1990).

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