Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist and short story writer whose works, drawn from his wide range of experiences in World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II, are characterized by terse minimalism and understatement; they exerted a significant influence on the development of twentieth century fiction. Hemingway's protagonists are typically stoic male individuals, often interpreted as projections of his own character, who must master "grace under pressure". Many of his works, like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea, are now considered classics in the canon of American literature.

World War I until the Spanish Civil War

Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months, and, against his father's wishes, tried to join the United States Army to assist in the effort in World War I. He did not pass the medical examination due to poor vision. Later, he enlisted in the American Field Service ambulance Corps and left for Italy, then mired in the war. En route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris. The city was under constant bombardment from German artillery.

Related Topics:
United States Army - World War I - American Field Service - Italy - Paris - German

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Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Hemingway tried to get as close to the combat as possible. Soon after arriving on the Italian front, he began to witness the brutalities of the war; on his first day of duty, an ammunition factory near Milan suffered an explosion. Hemingway had to pick up the human remains, mostly of women who had worked at the factory. This first and extremely cruel encounter with human death left him shaken. The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror; for example, one of them, Eric Dorman-Smith, quoted to him a line from Part Two of Shakespeare's Henry IV:

Related Topics:
Ammunition - Milan - Eric Dorman-Smith - Part Two of Shakespeare's ''Henry IV''

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By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe god a death...and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next{{ref|ref4}}.

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(Hemingway, for his part, would conjure this very same Shakespearean line in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, one of his later famous African short stories.) In another instance, a 50-year-old soldier, to whom Hemingway said, "You're troppo vecchio for this war, pop," replied, "I can die as well as any man"{{ref|ref5}}.

Related Topics:
Shakespeare - The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber - African

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At the Italian front on July 8, 1918, Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, ending his career as an ambulance driver. The exact details of this attack are not known, but two facts are certain: Hemingway was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell which left fragments in both of his legs, and he was subsequently awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian government. Later transferred to the Italian infantry, he was seriously injured in combat.

Related Topics:
Austrian - Trench - Mortar - Silver Medal of Military Valor - Government

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After this experience, Hemingway convalesced in a Milan hospital run by the American Red Cross. There he was to meet a nurse, Sister Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, D.C., one of 18 nurses attending groups of 4 patients each. Hemingway fell in love with Kurowsky, who was more than 6 years older than him, but this first relationship did not last. After he returned to the United States, she fell in love with and married another man.

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Literary aftermath of WWI

First novels and other early works

Once discharged from the Italian army, Hemingway returned to Oak Park. In 1920, he took a job in Toronto, Canada at the Toronto Star as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent.

Related Topics:
Toronto - Canada - Toronto Star - Correspondent

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About this time, Hemingway met Canada's young literary prodigy Morley Callaghan, who also was a cub reporter at the same paper. Callaghan, who respected Hemingway's work, showed his own stories to him and Hemingway praised it as fine work.

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In 1921, Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. The Hemingways decided to live abroad for a time, and, at the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled, along with Morley Callaghan and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Paris; there Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the Star. After the 1922 publication and American banning of colleague James Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway used Toronto-based friends to smuggle copies of the novel into the United States. Hemingway's own first book, called Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), was published in Paris by Robert McAlmon. In the same year, during a brief return to Toronto, Hemingway's first son, John, was born. Busy supporting a family, he became bored with the Toronto Star and resigned on January 1, 1924.

Related Topics:
Sherwood Anderson - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Greco-Turkish War - James Joyce - Ulysses - Robert McAlmon - January 1 - 1924

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Hemingway's American debut in literature is often associated with the publication of the short story collection In Our Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters of the American version were initially published in Europe as in our time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway, reaffirming to him that his minimalist style could be accepted by the literary community. "The Big Two-Hearted River" is the collection's best-known story.

Related Topics:
In Our Time - The Big Two-Hearted River

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After Hemingway's return to Paris, Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced Hemingway to the "Parisian Modern Movement" then ongoing in Montparnasse Quarter; this was the beginnings of the American expatriate circle that became known as the Lost Generation, a term coined by Stein. The group often frequented Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 18 Rue de l'Odéon. Hemingway's other influential mentor was Ezra Pound{{ref|ref6}}, the founder of imagism. Hemingway later said in reminiscence of this eclectic group:

Related Topics:
Gertrude Stein - Montparnasse Quarter - Lost Generation - Sylvia Beach's - Ezra Pound - Imagism

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Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right{{ref|ref7}}.

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Hemingway's favorite restaurant in Montparnasse was La Closerie des Lilas. It was here, in just over 6 weeks, that he wrote his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). The novel, semi-autobiographical in that it follows a group of expatriate Americans in Europe, was successful and was met with much critical acclaim. While Hemingway had initially claimed that the novel was an obsolete form of literature, he was apparently inspired to write one after reading Fitzgerald's manuscript for The Great Gatsby.

Related Topics:
The Sun Also Rises - The Great Gatsby

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Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic from Piggott, Arkansas, in 1927. That year saw the publication of Men Without Women, a collection of short stories, containing "The Killers," one of Hemingway's best-known and most-anthologized stories.

Related Topics:
Pauline Pfeiffer - Roman Catholic - Piggott, Arkansas - 1927 - Men Without Women - Short stories - The Killers

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In 1928, Hemingway's father, Clarence, troubled with diabetes and financial instabilities, committed suicide using an old Civil War pistol. This suicide was a great pain to Hemingway; he immediately traveled to Oak Park to arrange the funeral. Another suicide was of Harry Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press and friend of Hemingway from his days in Paris.

Related Topics:
Diabetes - Civil War - Pistol - Harry Crosby - Black Sun Press

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The last important work associated with the period following World War I is Hemingway's second novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929). It details the romance between Frederic Henry, an American soldier, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The novel is heavily autobiographical in nature: the plot is directly inspired by his experience with Sister von Kurowsky in Milan; the intense labor pains of his second wife, Pauline, in the birth of Hemingway's son Patrick inspired Catherine's labor in the novel; the real-life Kitty Cannell inspired the fictional Helen Ferguson; the priest was based on Don Giuseppe Bianchi, the priest of the 69th and 70th regiments of the Brigata Ancona. While the inspiration of the character Rinaldi is mysterious, curiously, he had already appeared in In Our Time.

Related Topics:
A Farewell to Arms - Frederic Henry - Nurse

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A Farewell to Arms was published at a time when many other World War I books were prominent, including Frederic Manning's Her Privates We, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That. A Farewell to Armss success rendered Hemingway essentially independent financially.

Related Topics:
Frederic Manning - Her Privates We - Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front - Richard Aldington - Death of a Hero - Robert Graves - Goodbye to All That

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The (First) Forty Nine Stories

Several of Hemingway's most famous short stories were written in the period following the war; in 1938—along with his only full-length play, entitled The Fifth Column—49 such stories were published in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. Hemingway's intention was, as he openly stated in his own foreword to the collection, to write more. It is unfortunate that this book is now often commercialized as just The Forty Nine Stories; the fact that Hemingway did not write many more stories subsequently does not detract from the original title but rather sheds an interesting light of nostalgia that could serve to represent Hemingway's taste, stoicism, and pessimistic outlook about life and death. Many of the stories that make up this collection can be found in other abridged collections, including In Our Time, Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Related Topics:
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories - Men Without Women - Winner Take Nothing - The Snows of Kilimanjaro

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Some of the collection's important stories include: Old Man at the Bridge, On The Quai at Smyrna, Hills Like White Elephants, One Reader Writes, The Killers and (perhaps most famously) A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. While these stories are rather short, the book also includes much longer stories. Among these the most famous are The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

Related Topics:
Hills Like White Elephants - A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - The Snows of Kilimanjaro - The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

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Only one other story collection by Hemingway appeared during his lifetime, entitled Four Stories Of The Spanish Civil War; "The Denunciation" is the most notable story therein. The Nick Adams Stories appeared posthumously in 1972. What is now considered the definitive compilation of all of Hemingway's short stories is published as The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, first compiled and published in 1987.

Related Topics:
Four Stories Of The Spanish Civil War - The Nick Adams Stories - The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway

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Early critical interplay

Hemingway's early works sold well and were generally received favorably by critics. This success elicited some crude and pretentious behavior from Hemingway, even in these formative years of his career. For example, he began to tell F. Scott Fitzgerald how to write; he also claimed that the English novelist Ford Madox Ford was sexually impotent. Hemingway in turn was the subject of much criticism. The journal Bookman attacked him as a dirty writer. McAlmon, the publisher of his first non-commercial book said, according to Fitzgerald, labeled him "a fag and a wife-beater"{{ref|ref8}} and claimed that Pauline was a lesbian. Gertrude Stein criticized him in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, suggesting that he had derived his prose style from her own and from Sherwood Anderson's{{ref|ref9}}.

Related Topics:
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Ford Madox Ford - Bookman - Lesbian - The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - Sherwood Anderson

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Max Eastman disparaged Hemingway harshly, asking him to "come out from behind that false hair on the chest." Eastman would go on to write an essay entitled Bull in the Afternoon, a satire of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Another facet of Eastman's criticism consisted in the suggestion that Hemingway ought to give up his lonely, tight-lipped stoicism and write about contemporary social affairs. Hemingway did so for at least a short time; his article Who Murdered the Vets? for New Masses, a leftist magazine, and To Have and Have Not displayed a certain heightened social awareness.

Related Topics:
Max Eastman - Bull in the Afternoon - Satire - Death in the Afternoon - Who Murdered the Vets? - New Masses - To Have and Have Not

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For Whom the Bell Tolls

Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939. Hemingway had lost an adopted homeland to Franco's fascist nationalists, and would later lose his beloved Key West, Florida home due to his 1940 divorce. His novel For Whom The Bell Tolls was published in 1940; the long work, which takes place during the Spanish Civil War, tells of an American man named "Robert Jordan" fighting on the side of the Republicans as part of the International Brigade. It is one of Hemingway's most notable literary accomplishments.

Related Topics:
Francisco Franco - Spanish Civil War - Key West, Florida - For Whom The Bell Tolls - International Brigade

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