Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. He was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

Hemingway's economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered Classics of American literature.

After finishing high school, Hemingway reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to enlist with the World War I ambulance drivers where he was wounded in 1918 and returned home. Hemingway's experiences in wartime formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent, and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s "Lost Generation" expatriate community. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first novel, was published in 1926.

Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer after his 1927 divorce from Hadley Richardson. However this marriage was also unsuccessful and the couple divorced after Hemingway returned from the Spanish Civil War where he had been a journalist. Drawing from his experience in the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway published For Whom the Bell Tolls. He married his third wife, Martha Gellhorn in 1940. They separated when he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II.

Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, one of his masterpieces, in 1952, Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in two successive plane crashes that left him in pain or ill health for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and 1940s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho, where he put an end to his life in the summer of 1961.

Writing style

The New York Times wrote in 1926 of Hemingway's first novel, "No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame."  The Sun Also Rises is written in the spare, tight prose that made Hemingway famous, and, according to James Nagel, "changed the nature of American writing."  In 1954, when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was for "his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style." Henry Louis Gates believes Hemingway's style was fundamentally shaped "in reaction to [his] experience of world war". After World War I, he and other modernists "lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization" by reacting against the elaborate style of 19th century writers and by creating a style "in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences a fiction in which nothing crucial or at least very little is stated explicitly."

The simplicity of the prose is deceptive. Zoe Trodd believes Hemingway crafted skeletal sentences in response to Henry James's observation that World War I had "used up words". Hemingway offers a "multi-focal" photographic reality. His iceberg theory of omission is the foundation on which he builds. The syntax, which lacks subordinating conjunctions, creates static sentences. The photographic "snapshot" style creates a collage of images. Many types of internal punctuation (colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses) are omitted in favor of short declarative sentences. The sentences build on each other, as events build to create a sense of the whole. Multiple strands exist in one story; an "embedded text" bridges to a different angle. He also uses other cinematic techniques of "cutting" quickly from one scene to the next; or of "splicing" a scene into another. Intentional omissions allow the reader to fill the gap, as though responding to instructions from the author, and create three-dimensional prose.

In his literature, and in his personal writing, Hemingway habitually used the word "and" in place of commas. This use of polysyndeton may serve to convey immediacy. Hemingway's polysyndetonic sentence or in later works his use of subordinate clauses uses conjunctions to juxtapose startling visions and images; Jackson Benson compares them to haikus. However, Hemingway's intent was not to eliminate emotion, but to portray it more scientifically. Hemingway thought it would be easy, and pointless, to describe emotions; he sculpted collages of images in order to grasp "the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always".  This use of an image as an objective correlative is characteristic of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Proust.  Hemingway's letters refer to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past several times over the years, and indicate he read the book at least twice.

Themes

The popularity of Hemingway's work to a great extent is based on the themes, which according to scholar Frederic Svoboda are love, war, wilderness and loss, all of which are strongly evident in the body of work. These are recurring themes of American literature, which are clearly evident in Hemingway's work. Critic Leslie Fiedler sees the theme he defines as "The Sacred Land" the American Westextended in Hemingway's work to include mountains in Spain, Switzerland and Africa, and to the streams of Michigan.The American West is given a symbolic nod with the naming of the "Hotel Montana" in The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.  According to Stoltzfus and Fiedler, Hemingway's nature is a place for rebirth, for therapy, and the hunter or fisherman has a moment of transcendence when the prey is killed.  Nature is where men are without women: men fish; men hunt; men find redemption in nature. Although Hemingway writes about sports, Carlos Baker believes the emphasis is more on the athlete than the sport, while Beegel sees the essence of Hemingway as an American naturalist, as reflected in such detailed descriptions as can be found in "Big Two-Hearted River".

The theme of women and death is evident in stories as early as "Indian Camp". The theme of death permeates Hemingway's work. Young believes the emphasis in "Indian Camp" was not so much on the woman who gives birth or the father who commits suicide, but on Nick Adams who witnesses these events as a child, and becomes a "badly scarred and nervous young man". Hemingway sets the events in "Indian Camp" that shape the Adams persona. Young believes "Indian Camp" holds the "master key" to "what its author was up to for some thirty-five years of his writing career.

The theme of emasculation is prevalent in Hemingway's work, most notably in The Sun Also Rises. Emasculation, according to Fiedler, is a result of a generation of wounded soldiers; and of a generation in which women such as Brett gained. This also applies to the minor character, Frances Clyne, Cohn's girlfriend in the beginning in the book. Her character supports the theme not only because the idea was presented early on in the novel but also the impact she had on Cohn in the start of the book while only appearing a small number of times.

Death

Hemingway died July 2, 1961, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Important Works

Novels

Ø  The Torrents of Spring (1926)

Ø  The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Ø  A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Ø  To Have and Have not (1937)

Ø  For Whom the Bells Tolls (1940)

Ø  Across the River and into the Trees (1950)

Ø  The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Non-fiction

Ø  Death in the Afternoon (1932)

Ø  Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Short Stories

Ø  Big Two-Hearted River (1925)

Ø  Indian Camp (1925)

Ø  Soldier’s Home (1925)

Ø  Fifty Grand (1927)

Ø  Hills Like White Elephants (1927)

Ø  Fathers and Sons (1932)

Ø  The Capital of the World (1936)

Short Story Collections

Ø  In Our Time (1925)

Ø  Men Without Women (1927)

Ø  Winner Take Nothing (1933)

Ø  The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961)

Poems

Ø  88 Poems (1979)

Ø  Complete Poems

Posthumous

Ø  A Moveable Feast (1964)

Ø  Islands in the Steam (1970)

Ø  The Garden of Eden (1986)

Ø  True at First Light (1999)

   Ø Under Kilimanjaro (2005).