|
Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)
.
Writer; born in Oak Park, Ill. Son of a doctor (who would commit suicide), he never attended
college but became a journalist for the Kansas City Star (1917--18). He served with the Red
Cross Ambulance Corps in France (1917--18) and was wounded while accompanying the Italian
army into battle. He worked as a journalist, covering the Greco-Turkish war for the Toronto Star
(1920). In Chicago, he married (his first of four wives) and went back to Europe to serve as a
foreign correspondent (1921-24). He made frequent trips to Spain and the Austrian Alps but for
the most part was based in Paris where he fell in with the expatriate circle centered around
Gertrude Stein. His first published work was Three Stories already his distinctive voice was in
evidence-simple sentences, enigmatic dialogue, precise description. His first novel, Torrents of
Spring (1926), was more a satire of Maxwell Anderson, but The Sun Also Rises (1926) gained
him instant acclaim and seemed to capture what Stein labeled "the lost generation." Men Without
Women (1927), another collection of stories, maintained his reputation, while his next novel, A
Farewell to Arms (1929), advanced him to the front ranks of contemporary writers. He had
returned to the U.S.A. in 1927 but would never stay long in one place, seemingly always in need
of adventure--deep-sea fishing off Key West, Fla., big-game hunting in Africa. He had long been
dedicated to Spanish bullfighting--his nonfictional work, Death in the Afternoon (1932), effectively
introduced it to the non-Spanish world--and when the Spanish Civil War broke out, he went off to
cover it (1936--38); he identified with the anti-Fascists, and his only play, The Fifth Column
(1938), and one of his better novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), came out of this
experience. By now he was more than a well-known writer--he had become one of the great
celebrities of the century, his every word, activity, drink, and clothing style reported on in
magazines such as Life. In 1940 he bought a house in Cuba that was to be a fairly regular
stopover (and which Fidel Castro and the Cubans treated as a historical site). In World War II, he
is said to have aided in espionage in the Caribbean under cover of deep-sea fishing; he then went
to England to report on the Royal Air Force and he accompanied the Allied forces on their drive
to liberate Paris. After the war, his talents as a writer seemed to have dulled, but he recaptured
both popular and critical audiences with his short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), and
ended up with the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954. Restless and unable to complete new writing
projects, he became prone to various physical ailments, mental depression, and eventually a form
of paranoia; he committed suicide by shooting himself at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. A series of
works, including A Moveable Feast (1964), appeared posthumously. Hemingway's terse prose
style, self-promoted macho image, and stress on the search for physical challenges have all lent
themselves to imitation and parody; but at their best his writing, life, and themes ensured him a role
as one of the century's major literary figures.
books
|
