“Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat as the taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue. ” (‘On the Blue Water’ in Esquire, April 1936) A legendary novelist, short-story writer and essayist Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in the village of Oak Park, Illinois, close to the prairies and woods west of Chicago.
His mother Grace Hall had an operatic career before marrying Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway. While growing up, the young Hemingway spent lots of his time hunting and fishing with his physician father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, and learned about the ways of music with his mother, who was a musician and artist. He was the second of Clarence and Grace Hemingway’s six children. He was raised in a strict Protestant community that tried as hard as possible to be separate themselves from the big city of Chicago, though they were very close geographically.
Both parents and their nearby families fostered the Victorian priorities of the time: religion, family, work and discipline. They followed the Victorians’ elaborate sentimental style in living and writing. He attended school in the Oak Park Public School system and in high school, Hemingway played sports and wrote for the school newspaper. At Oak Park and River Forest High School, Ernest reported and wrote articles, poems and stories for the school’s publications largely based on his direct experiences. Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.
He was unable to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm, because he was recuperating from injuries sustained in an airplane crash while hunting in Uganda. In July, 1961, he ended his life in Ketchum, Idaho. Hemingway may have been a homosexual in denial. His determination to keep up his manhood’s “good name” may have been a decoy to hide his true homosexuality. As a Rolling Stone article notes, his son was in fact gay. Perhaps he got it genetically from his father, Ernest Hemingway. Many things were repeated in that family.
Hemingway, the depressed drunk, committed suicide just like his father. However, there were different reasons. Hemingway’s father took his own life in 1928 after losing his healt to diabetes and his money in the Florida real-estate bubble. After Hemingway’s depression he was sent to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. There he received electroshock therapy that impaired his memory and stripped from him the concentration to write. Hemingway also lost the ability to do other things he so loved like fish and hunt.
So perhaps he killed himself because Ernest Hemingway could no longer “be” Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. Here he learned to get to the heart of a story with direct, simple sentences. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Here he was wounded near the Italian/Austrian front. Hospitalized, he fell in love with his nurse, who later called off their relationship.
After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution. During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work The Sun Also Rises’ (1926). After the World War I, Hemingway lived in Chicago. There, he met Sherwood Andersen and married Hadley Richardson in 1921. On Andersen’s advice, the couple moved to Paris, where he served as foreign correspondent for the Star.
As Hemingway covered events on all of Europe, the young reporter interviewed important leaders such as Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Mussolini. Hemingway lived in Paris from 1921-1926. This time of stylistic development for Hemingway reaches its zenith in 1923 with the publication of Three Stories’ and Ten Poems’ by Robert McAlmon in Paris and the birth of his son John. This time in Paris inspired the novel A Moveable Feast’. In 1927 Hemingway published a short story collection, Men Without Women’. So too, in that year he divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline, a write for Vogue.
In 1928 they moved to Key West, where sons Patrick and Gregory were born. After the publication of Men Without Women’ Hemingway returned to the United States, settling in Key West, Florida. Hemingway and Hadley divorced in 1927 and on the same year he married Pauline, a fashion editor. These dramatic personal events against the backdrop of a brutal war became the basis of Hemingway’s first widely successful novel A Farewell to Arms’ published in 1929. The scene of the story is the Italian front in World War I, where two lovers find a brief happiness.
It is about the study of an American ambulance officer’s disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. After growing success with his groundbreaking style, Hemingway wrote out of his own direct experience about bullfighting, big game hunting and deep sea fishing on three continents. In addition to personal experiences with war and death, Hemingway’s extensive travel in pursuit of hunting and other sports provided ample material for his novels. Bullfighting inspired Death in the Afternoon, published in 1932.
In 1934, Hemingway went on safari in Africa, which gave him new themes and scenes on which to base The Green Hills of Africa’, published in 1935. Wallace Stevens once termed Hemingway “the most significant of living poets, so far as the subject of extraordinary reality is concerned. ” By ‘poet’ Stevens referred to Hemingway’s stylistic achievements in the short story. Among his most famous stories is ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ (1935) which begins with an epitaph telling that the western summit of the mountain is called the House of God, and close to it was found the carcass of a leopard.
Down on the savanna the failed writer Harry is dying of gangrene in a hunting camp. “He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wrote it all out. ” Just before the end of the story Harry has a vision. He dreams that he is taken up the see the top of Kilimanjaro on a rescue plane -“great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun. ” He traveled to Spain as a war correspondent in 1937, the same year as To Have and Have Not’ was written. After his divorce from Pauline in 1940, Hemingway married Martha, a writer.
He used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel For Whom the Bell Tolls’ (1940). In the years following World War II, many critics said Hemingway’s best writing was past. But he surprised them all by publishing the most outstanding short novel The Old Man and the Sea’ created in 1952. It is about an old Cuban fisherman’s journey, his long, poor and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
Ernest Hemingway has received several awards for this work such as the Pulitzer Prize in 1952. Two years later he received the Nobel Prize for his “powerful, style-making mastery of the art of modern narration”. Hemingway – himself a great sportsman – liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters – tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. On July 2, 1961, he died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds and was buried in Ketchum.
Papa” was both a legendary celebrity and a sensitive writer, and his influence, as well as unseen writings, survived his passing. In 1964 A Moveable Feast’ was published; in1969, The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War’; in1970, Islands in the Stream’ published; in 1972, The Nick Adams Stories’; in1985, The Dangerous Summer’; and in 1986 The Garden of Eden’ were published. Hemingway’s own life and character are indeed as fascinating as any in his stories. On one level, Papa was a legendary adventurer who enjoyed his flamboyant lifestyle and celebrity status.
But deep inside lived a disciplined author who worked tirelessly in pursuit of literary perfection. His success in both living and writing is reflected in the fact that Hemingway is a hero to both intellectuals and rebels alike; the passions of the man are only equaled by that of his writing. The Sun Also Rises’ will maintain a place in history not only for its literary merit, but also for its documentation of what writer Gertrude Stein called the “Lost Generation. ” After WWI, many young Americans left their native country, bitter over the war and seeking adventure.
A circle of artistic expatriates – among them Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, and Pablo Picasso – formed in Paris under Stein’s guidance and shared their revolutionary ideas on art. While they helped define Modernist techniques in literature and painting, the Americans, in particular, catalogued the social upheaval in their homeland. While reeling from a huge blow to their innocence, Americans drifted irresponsibly through the prosperous era now known as the Roaring 20s.
Hemingway and Fitzgerald employed their keen social observation in writing The Sun Also Rises’ and The Great Gatsby, respectively, widely considered the two masterpieces of Lost Generation fiction. The novels are remarkably similar: a somewhat indistinct young man narrates a story of unrequited desire for an untouchable woman in a hedonistic social environment. The major difference is that in The Sun Also Rises’, it is the narrator whose desire is unrequited, and because of a physical impairment, whereas in Fitzgerald’s work, Gatsby cannot have his love interest for other reasons.
While Hemingway, like Fitzgerald, explores and critiques the superficiality of his characters’ indulgent lifestyles, he touches upon a number of other themes, many of which have to do with new notions of masculinity arising after the war. Jake’s purported impotence is a powerful symbol for the emasculated postwar male psyche, and bull-fighting describes sex as warfare on several metaphorical levels. These ideas are delivered in Hemingway’s spare, unadorned, journalistic prose.
Hemingway conceived of the idea for The Sun Also Rises’ while attending the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, with friends in July, 1925. Hemingway had set up the beautiful Lady Duff Twysden, the inspiration for Brett, with Cayetano Ordonez, the model for Romero. He felt guilty over compromising Ordonez’s “affection” with a foreign woman, and possibly wrote the story – with “Hem” as his stand-in matchmaker – as a means to exculpate himself. The real-life conflict spun out to Harold Loeb and Pat Guthrie.
Ogden Stewart rounded out the group in the novel as Bill Gorton. Hemingway soon expanded the story into a novel originally entitled Fiesta: A Novel’. He shifted the opening to Paris and heightened the relationship between Brett and the narrator – now called Jake. He ran through several more revisions, often with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s help, and changed the novel to its current title just before printing in October 1926. The book was a success and established Hemingway as an internationally known author.
