Ernest Hemingway
(1899–1961)
Ernest Hemingway is probably the most widely imitated American writer of the twentieth century. Few writers of our time have escaped a confrontation with him and the acceptance or rejection of his influence. The art of fiction has gained new life from techniques he perfected—a deceptively simple, rhythmic prose that is admirably suited to depicting moments of action and the rapid, terse dialogue that reflects the nature of Hemingway’s characters quietly standing up to the pain of life. Hemingway has made two major contributions other than technique to American literature. The first of these is a vision of life both as a kind of perpetual battlefield where everyone is eventually wounded and as a game with almost formal moves. The second is the "Hemingway hero," a man for whom it is a point of honor to suffer with grace and dignity, and who, though sensing that defeat is inevitable, plays the game well.
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father was a doctor who loved the out-of-doors and took his son on hunting and fishing trips in northern Michigan. At Oak Park High School he was an athlete, but he also worked on the school newspaper and published stories in the literary magazine. In 1917, when he graduated, the United States had already entered World War I. Hemingway wanted to enlist and fight in Europe, but was rejected because of eye damage he had received as a high school boxer. Instead he got a job as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star. In 1918 he joined a Red Cross ambulance corps and was sent to the Italian front. He was severely wounded by an artillery shell and for three months lay convalescing in a hospital in Milan. He then returned to Illinois. Thereafter, his thoughts circled about the significance of his wound, and he also came to discover the many ways a man can be wounded in peacetime as well as on a battlefront.
For the next year or so he made his living at newspaper work. He became a friend of Sherwood Anderson and, with the older man’s encouragement, kept trying to write poems and short stories. He spent his spare time in gymnasiums, boxing and watching boxers, fascinated by this sport where men are tested through pain and danger. Later he discovered bullfighting and wrote Death in the Afternoon, a book exploring the significance of the duel between human being and animal.
In 1921 he got a job as a roving correspondent with the Toronto Star and left for Europe. There, chiefly in Paris, he met other young Americans of his generation who had left the United States in the belief that they would find personal and artistic fulfillment in an older civilization. As a reporter, Hemingway traveled through Europe and the Near East, finding material that would later serve him as a writer of fiction. In Paris, he fell under the influence of Gertrude Stein, who had outraged many readers with her experiments in language. Stein sought to gain her effects by use of simple language, rhythm, and repetition. Hemingway worked hard under her tutelage, bringing stories to her for criticism and making changes as she suggested. Later he rebelled against her, but he never denied that she had helped his art.
Hemingway’s earliest two books were privately published in Paris. In Our Time, a collection of short stories published in 1925, was his first book to reach a general audience. The perceptive critic Edmund Wilson saw in these early books the debut of a gifted young writer, but it took the publication of The Sun Also Rises (1926) to give Hemingway a wide audience. This novel, about a group of English and American expatriates hunting for sensations that would allow them to forget the pain attending life, gave everyone a new phrase to describe those who had lived through World War I and who had become disillusioned with the war’s ideals: "the lost generation." In his next novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway wrote about the war itself and a romance growing out of it. His description of the retreat from Caporetto is a famous episode in the novel. All the while, he was writing brilliant short stories that later were collected in Men Without Women and Winner Take Nothing.
With each book Hemingway’s personal fame grew. He was regarded as the original hero of his stories, a big tough man hunting in Africa, deep-sea fishing, and following the bullfight. As a hero who lived dangerously and gracefully, he became the embodiment of the attitudes made popular by his writing. In the thirties he covered the Spanish Civil War as a foreign correspondent. Out of this experience came his most popular novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The title of this book is taken from John Donne’s famous meditation, and both the novel and the title reflect Hemingway’s growing commitment to larger issues. Instead of concentrating on the ordeals of personal existence, Hemingway and his hero, Robert Jordan, are concerned not only with individual fate but with the lot of humanity. In The Old Man and the Sea, the last notable work published during his lifetime, Hemingway returned to his old theme, the testing of the individual, but, in the old man’s calm acceptance of his fate, gave it a new dignity. In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
In 1961, after a period of mounting depression and illness, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A Moveable Feast, his posthumously published memoir of his early days in Paris, is regarded by some readers as one of his best works. Since his death, it seems clearer than ever that Hemingway’s best work has the concise intensity of fine poetry and that his artistic quest for the fewest and best words was similar to that of many poets.
