Hemingways Literature

Hemingway, Ernest Miller (1899-1961), American novelist and short-story writer, whose style is characterized by crispness, laconic dialogue, and emotional understatement. Hemingways writings and his personal life exerted a profound influence on American writers of his time. Many of his works are regarded as classics of American literature, and some have been made into motion pictures.

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway was educated at Oak Park High School. After graduating from high school in 1917, he became a reporter for the Kansas City Star, but he left his job within a few months to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I (1914-1918). He later transferred to the Italian infantry and was severely wounded. After the war he served as a correspondent for the Toronto Star and then settled in Paris. While there, he was encouraged in creative work by the American expatriate writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. After 1927 Hemingway spent long periods of time in Key West, Florida, and in Spain and Africa.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), he returned to Spain as a newspaper correspondent. In World War II (1939-1945) he again was a correspondent and later was a reporter for the United States First Army; although he was not a soldier, he participated in several battles. After the war Hemingway settled near Havana, Cuba, and in 1958 he moved to Ketchum, Idaho.

Hemingway drew heavily on his experiences as an avid fisherman, hunter, and bullfight enthusiast (see Bullfighting) in his writing. His adventurous life brought him close to death several times: in the Spanish Civil War when shells burst inside his hotel room; in World War II when he was struck by a taxi during a blackout; and in 1954 when his airplane crashed in Africa.

II A writer of the lost generation One of the foremost authors of the era between the two world wars, Hemingway in his early works depicted the lives of two types of people. One type consisted of men and women deprived, by World War I, of faith in the moral values in which they had believed, and who lived with cynical disregard for anything but their own emotional needs. The other type were men of simple character and primitive emotions, such as prizefighters and bullfighters. Hemingway wrote of their courageous and usually futile battles against circumstances. His earliest works include the collections of short stories Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), his first work; In Our Time (1924), tales reflecting his experiences as a youth in the northern Michigan woods; Men Without Women (1927), a volume that included The Killers, remarkable for its description of impending doom; and Winner Take Nothing (1933), stories characterizing people in unfortunate circumstances in Europe. The novel that established Hemingways reputation, The Sun Also Rises (1926), is the story of a group of morally irresponsible Americans and Britons living in France and Spain, members of the so-called lost ...