Ernest
Hemingway
(1899-1961)
from
"Fields of Vision by D.Delaney”
Life
An early call to action and writing The second of six children, Hemingway was born in 1899 in Chicago. As a child he
loved physical challenges, and throughout high school he played football and
boxed. After graduating he moved to Kansas
City to work as a junior reporter for a local
newspaper. During the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver for
the Red Cross. He was sent to the Italian front, where he was severely wounded.
He was treated in a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with a nurse.
These experiences later inspired his novel A
Farewell To Arms. After the war Hemingway returned home as a war hero and
was decorated for his courage.
He went back to journalism and worked for a
Canadian newspaper for which he covered the Greco-Turkish War in 1920. He
married the following year. It was the first of four marriages that produced
three sons.
Success and adventure In the 1920s the Hemingways lived in Paris,
were they entered the intellectually dynamic circle of expatriate authors and
artists that included Francis Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and
Gertrude Stein. This was a time of stylistic development for Hemingway, and an extremely
productive period that culminated in the widely successful novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). In 1928
Hemingway settled in Key West, Florida. Here he completed A Farewell to Arms, published to wide acclaim in 1929. The movie
rights of the novel were sold for $24,000, an enormous sum of money for the
time. Looking for new emotions and inspiration, he spent some time in Africa in
1933 and 1934. The experience provided him with material for the novel Green
Hill of Africa (1935) and his most famous short story, The Snow of Kilimanjaro
(1936).
In the late 1930s, Hemingway went to cover the
Spanish Civil War as a correspondent for an American news agency, and this
experience was recorded in For Whom the
Bell Tolls (1940), which sold 500,000
copies in the first five months following its publication. His work as a war
correspondent continued during the Second World War.
Mental and physical decline In 1946 Hemingway settled with his third wife in Cuba. After the
disappointing response to his 1950 novel, Across
the River and into the Trees, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea (1952),
the story of an elderly fishrman’s lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and
his victory in defeat. The book was an instant success. It won the Pulitzer
Prize and ultimately let to the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. However,
Hemingway was unable to attend the prize ceremonies: his health was deteriorating
and he had turned to heavy drinking. Afflicted by physical and mental health
problems, he produced no new works in the final years of his life. On July 2nd
1961 he committed suicide at the age of sixty-one.
Works
An American icon
Hemingway, the hard-living writer-adventurer, was hero and correspondent,
womanizer and excessive drinker, is one of the greatest American literary
icons.
Experience-based stories As a writer, he drew heavily upon his own personal experiences: his
involvement in the wars, his extensive travels, and his love for the primitive
emotions inspired by fishing, hunting and bullfighting. Hemingway’s characters
are often like himself: lonely heroes whose courage and independence do not
guarantee victory. In Hemingway’s work, defeat is an integral part of the human
condition.
His literary style
Hemingway’s literary style was shaped early in his career when he worked as a
reporter in Kansas City. Writing about small events for small-town people
taught him to use the sparse, straightforward, unemotional and yet vigorous
prose that is his trademark. The essence of his talent lies in his unmatched
ability to concentrate actions and events in simple yet powerful sentences
where there is no space for wordy descriptions or sentimentality. The focus of
his writing is always on facts. He believed that if a writer could accurately
describe the facts that cause emotion, it was unnecessary for him to describe
emotion.
Other elements of Hemingway’s style include his
use of interior monologue and nature symbolism. In A Farewell to Arms, for example, rain represents
death and all the connected feelings of pain and despair. After the death of
the female protagonist, the book ends with the words "I … walked back to the
hotel in the rain.”
Hemingway’s literary style had a great impact on
the writers who followed him, and was taken to a more extreme level by the
American minimalists of the 1980s.
External Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway
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