Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois. His father, a keen sportsman and ethnographer, was a doctor. Ernest took to reading books at an early age. At school Ernest was recognized as an exceptionally good football player and boxer. Later at school he began to show a fondness for literature and became the editor of the school’s weekly paper.

When he left school, he took a job on the paper “Kansas City Star” as a reporter. During the First World War, he served on the Italian front, being severely wounded and decorated for valor. He again entered newspaper work, reporting on the Greco-Turkish War in 1920, and working as Paris correspondent.

Hemingway was always in the right place at the right time to get the biggest news. He absorbed people, places and life like a sponge. Hemingway devoted 36 years of his life to journalism (1920-1956) and may well be considered one of the most experienced journalists of the 20^th century. He made it his principle to write absolute truth. He wrote in a clear and lucid manner.

In Paris he began to write fiction and was “discovered” by the critics in the USA. He returned to his homeland to write, going abroad now and then for travel in Europe or big game hunting in Africa.

The Civil War in Spain (1936-1939) was a turning point in the writer’s life. He was eager to help the republicans and did everything he could. He raised money for Spain. He bought several ambulance cars and took

an active part in the fight against fascism as a correspondent and writer.

After the war he lived in Cuba. There he wrote his famous short novel “The Old Man and the Sea” that was a tribute to a simple man, a Cuban fisherman. It was after writing this book that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature (1954). He was forced to leave Cuba because of the Castro Revolution.

After some travelling he settled in Idaho. His health began to deteriorate. The last years of his life he was seriously ill, and, following hospitalization, he died of a gun-short wound by his own hand (02.07.1961).

He was buried at Ketchum, Idaho.

Hemingway was influenced by Mark Twain’s style, which though like oral speech, was notable for its poetic overtones. In Hemingway’s best works there is a unique combination of strength with poetic subtlety and depth of sympathy, which appeals to modern readers.

In a manner, there were two Hemingways. One was a flamboyant adventurer - the lively legend in the spotlight. The other Hemingway was the skilful, sensitive author who patiently wrote, rewrote, and edited his works. “A Farewell to Arms” required eight months for writing the first draft and another five months for rewriting, according to Hemingway, who claimed to have rewritten the last page thirty-nine times. That writing discipline begun in the twenties persisted throughout his literary career. In discussing “The Old Man and the Sea”, Hemingway is said to have read through the manuscript some two hundred times before releasing it.

Hemingway, the colourful legend, was also the author who said, “What many other writers would be content to leave in massive proportions, I polish into a tiny gem.”

Hemingway’s Major Works:

Hemingway made himself a legend and his publication of a new novel an event. Two volumes of his short stories “In Our Time” (1924) and “Men without Women” (1927) and his first important novel “The Sun Also Rises” (1926) marked him as an outstanding young writer.

He reached one successful peak after another of critical and popular acclaim with two war novels “A Farewell to Arms” (1929) and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940). The first, based directly on Hemingway’s Italian war experiences, is one of the best American wartime novels, even though his disciplined art breaks into sentimentality at times. It is a story of one man’s withdrawal from war into love, a love which ends in futility. The second novel is a Spanish Civil War story, where the hero, Robert Jordan, loses his life in a lost cause. War and violence are the materials of the Hemingway approach. Hemingway’s heroes are all losers. As Santiago, the hero of “The Old Man and the Sea”, puts it, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated”.

“Death in the Afternoon” (1932) and “The Green Hills of Africa” (1935) present the rituals of bull-fighting and big game hunting as non-fictional, personal and topical books.

His other novels:

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936);

“To Have and to Have Not” (1937);

“Across the River and Into the Trees” (1950);

“The Old Man and the Sea” (1952);

“A Movable Feast” (1964) is a posthumously published account of his early Paris days.

Hemingway’s aim to write absolute truth induced him to create a new style. He avoided conventional narration in his stories. He tried to make his readers understand his ideas about nature, labour and war by sketching in vivid scenes his own experience. Leaving out many unnecessary details Hemingway mastered a new short-story form. The language of Hemingway’s works is of bare simplicity; it is in keeping with the characters he wants to portray. It is surprising how he reveals the inner world of his personages in short dialogues and colloquial phrases. Plain words in simple declarative sentences bring out sensations of the central characters.

Hemingway was the inventor of the so-called “theory of an iceberg”. He wrote, “… if a writer of prose knows enough what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer has stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”.