A Farewell to Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway, born on this day, 21st July 1899- 2 July 1961, was 

• An american novelist & short-story writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,

• Noted for the intense masculinity of his writing & adventurous life, 

• Succint & lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American & British fiction in the 20th century, 

• Educated in Public schools & beginning to write in high school, he was active & outstanding. 

•  Parts of his boyhood that mattered most were summers spent with his family on Waloon Lake in upper Michigan, 

• Advised & encouraged by other American writers in Paris -F. Scott Fitzerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print, 📚🕮📚📚

• In 1925, his first important book, a collection of stories called "In Our Time", was published in New York City, 

• In 1926, he published "The Sun also Rises", with which he scored his first solid success, 

• Hemingway's "The Torrents of Spring", a parody of the American writer Sherwood Anderson's book Dark Laughter also appeared in 1926, 

• The writing of books occupied Hemingway for most of his post-war years, 

• His position as a master of short fiction had been advanced by "Men Without Women", in 1927 & thoroughly established with the "Stories in Winner Take Nothing", in 1933, 

• Among his finest stories are "The Killers", "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macober", and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", 

• At least in the public view, however, the novel "A Farewell to Arms: (1929), overshadowed such works 

• Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with war story 💓💗

• Hemingway's love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in "Death in the Afternoon" (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more as a tragic ceremony than as a sport. 

• A minor novel of 1937 called "To Have and Have not", is about a Carribean desperado and is set against a backgroung of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence in Key West during the Great Depression, 

• The harvest of Hemingway's considerable experience of Spain in war & peace was the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940). A substantial and impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel in preference to "A Farewell to Arms". 

• It was also the most successful of all his books as measured in sales 

• Through dialogue, flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling & vivid profiles of the Spanish character & unsparingly depicts the cruelty & inhumanity stirred up by a civil war. 

• All of his life, Hemingway was fascinated by war-in "A Farewell to Arms", he focused on its pointlessness, in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" on the comradeship it creates and, as World War II progressed, he made his way to London as a journalist. ✎🖉

• In 1953, he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for "The Old Man and the Sea" 👴🌊🌊 (1952), a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who, after an exended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin only to have it eaten by voracious sharks 🦈🦈🦈during the long voyage home. 

• This book played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. 

 

• By 1960, Hemingway had left Cuba & settled in Idaho.  

•  He tried to lead his life & do his work as before. For a while, he suceeded, but anxiety-ridden & depressed, he was twice hospitalized at the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the house in Ketchum, he took his life with a shot gun.  

•  Hemingway left behind a substantial amount of manuscript, some of which has been published. 

 

• Hemingway's characters plainly embody his own values & view of life. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the World, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and offerring almost unavoidable pain, hurt & destruction. To survive in such a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as "The Hemingway Code".  To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show "grace under pressure" and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme clearly established in the "The Old Man and the Sea".  

• Hemingway's prose style was probably the most widely imitated of any of the 20th century. 

• He wished to strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of verbosity, embellishment & sentimentality. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of describing a series of actions by using short, simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has been eliminated.  

• The resulting terse, concentrated prose is concrete & unemotional, yet is often resonant  & capable of conveying great irony through understatement. Hemingway's use of dialogue was similarly fresh, simple, & natural-sounding. The influence of this styles way felt worldwide wherever novels were written, particularly from the 1930s throught the 1950s. 

• A consummately contradictory man, Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed by few, if any American authors of the 20th century. 

• The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to re-create the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy. 

• He was a celebrity long beford he reached middle age, but his popularity continues to be validated by serious critical opinion. 

All information is from Britannica: 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernest-Hemingway. 

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