Hemingway, Ernest

(b. July 21, 1899; d. July 2, 1961) Author.

Ernest Hemingway was one of America's foremost novelists. He began his career as a newspaper reporter and Red Cross volunteer in World War I. Hemingway became part of the "Lost Generation" of writers, artists, and poets after World War I who were disillusioned with American society and its creed of progress following the brutality of that war. Like many of that generation, the experience of war shaped their view of life. War also left an indelible mark on Hemingway's personality that would haunt him until his suicide.

Growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway was torn between two paths. His mother taught him to appreciate art and music. His father, a country doctor, taught him the delights of the outdoors, including hunting. When his father forbad Ernest from joining the Army after America declared war on Germany in 1917, the young Hemingway became a reporter with the Kansas City Star. It was there, among newspaper men, that he began to learn the style that would make him one of the twentieth century's most famous and widely-read authors: short, declarative sentences and an aversion to the prettified descriptions and mannered prose of the last century.

Still, even covering the excitement of local police precincts and hospitals wasn't enough for Hemingway. He craved the action and glory like in the stories he'd invented as a child, imagining himself as the dashing hero. After six months with the Kansas City Star, he decided he had had enough of newspaper work.

Hemingway enlisted in the American Red Cross as an ambulance driver and within a few weeks was in Italy, where he got his first taste of modern mechanized warfare: bloody, brutal, and unremitting. In his letters home, he described his shock at the dismembered bodies and the corpses of innocent civilians. The sight of dead women at an exploded munitions factory in Milan, Italy, seems to have troubled him particularly. A few weeks later, on July 8, 1918, he got his second taste of war when an artillery shell exploded nearby, sending more than 200 fragments into his leg.

It was while he was recovering from this wound that Hemingway met and fell deeply in love with a young nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. Though she rejected him and broke his heart, Agnes would appear as the doomed nurse so loved by Frederic Henry, an American

in the Italian ambulance service, in Hemingway's novel of World War I, A Farewell To Arms (1929).

No longer fit for the ambulance service, Hemingway returned to newspaper work, taking a position with the Toronto Star in 1920. After a year, he married Hadley Richardson and relocated to Paris to cover the Greco-Turkish War. A short time later, in 1923, Three Stories and Ten Poems made its appearance, as did Hemingway's first son, John.

It was during this time, too, that Hemingway became attached to a collection of disaffected expatriate Americans in Paris, a group of people who became the basis for his first noteworthy novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Among them was the typical Hemingway surrogate, the damaged, cynical and still hopeful Jake Barnes. Later yet, Hemingway would employ his recollections as a reporter covering the civil war in Spain, and supporting the Loyalist cause against the fascists, to weave his most daring and structurally complex novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). These were innovative works of fiction: lean, cold, and immediate. His people were often soldiers, or hunters, or fighters, and their lives were etched in Hemingway's simple, muscular prose, without embellishment. With A Farewell To Arms and his many short stories, these novels became the foundation of Hemingway's literary reputation.

By the time he was thirty, Ernest Hemingway was a world-renowned writer of novels, short stories, and nonfiction. But all was not well. The adult Hemingway was capable of decidedly childish behavior. The bullying tendencies he had displayed as a young man too often reasserted themselves, to disastrous effect. He fell out with old friends and influences. Gertrude Stein he alienated; Sherwood Anderson, sometimes described as the grandfather of Hemingway's prose style, he ridiculed mercilessly in his novel The Torrents of Spring (1926). His four marriages were rocky.

In the late 1930s Hemingway again sought adventure and a cause. He volunteered with other American idealists to fight against the fascists in Spain. He observed this bloody civil war—one that became a prelude to World War II—and made it the context for one of his most successful novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was adapted for film in 1943. In 1944 he became a war reporter covering the American campaign in Germany. His love of conflict took him beyond observation into combat under the guise of being a reporter. A man seeking the exhilaration of war, Hemingway seemed lost as a man and writer in peace.

As Hemingway aged, more problems appeared. The prose style, once celebrated, seemed often to descend into self-parody. Critical opinion turned against him. His novel Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) was widely panned. Another effort, Islands in the Stream (published posthumously in 1970) he forsook as too poor. Not until the publication of his short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952) did he regain the reputation of his early career. The book won Hemingway the 1953 Pulitzer Prize. A year later, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

It was, perhaps, too little, too late. Hemingway's drinking, always heroic, grew worse. He underwent bouts of paranoia and depression. Legendarily accident prone, he suffered a number of debilitating injuries. During a visit to Africa in 1954, he was involved in not one, but two nearly-fatal airplane crashes; his premature obituary was widely published. Hemingway sneered, but he suffered grievous wounds. Physical pain exacerbated his drinking and robbed him of his ability to work.

On 2 July 1961, Ernest Hemingway took his own life, having attempted suicide once already that year. A number of noteworthy works, among them A Moveable Feast (1964), The Nick Adams Stories (1972), and The Dangerous Summer (1985) were published after his death.

Journalism, World War I; Literature, World War I; Literature, World War II; Motion Pictures, World War I and World War Ii.

Brenner, Gerry and Rovit, Earl. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

Dolan, Marc. Modern Lives : A Cultural Re-reading of the "Lost Generation." West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996.

Oliver, Charles M. Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 1999.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Final Years. New York: Norton, 1999.

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