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Introduction
Biography
Personal
Education
Career
Awards/Honors
Writings
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Nancy
Imelda Schafer Hemingway is lauded as one of the
greatest American writers of the twentieth century. Considered a master
of the understated prose style which became his trademark, he was
awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature. Although his literary
stature is secure, he remains a highly controversial writer, and his
novels and short stories have evoked an enormous amount of critical
commentary. His narrow range of characters and his thematic focus on
violence and machismo, as well as his terse, objective prose, have led
some critics to regard his fiction as shallow and insensitive. Others
claim that beneath the deceptively limited surface lies a complex and
fully realized fictional world. Although Hemingway's literary
achievement has been measured chiefly by his novels The Sun Also
Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and The
Old Man and the Sea (1952), his short stories have increasingly
won critical acclaim. Today, works of both genres are widely read, and
Hemingway remains one of the most imitated writers in modern literature.
Born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park,
Illinois, United States; committed suicide, July 2, 1961, in Ketchum,
Idaho, United States son of Clarence Edmunds (a physician) and Grace (a
music teacher; maiden name, Hall) Hemingway: married Hadley Richardson,
September 3, 1921 (divorced March 10, 1927); married Pauline Pfeiffer (a
writer), May 10, 1927 (divorced November 4, 1940); married Martha
Gellhorn (a writer), November 21, 1940 (divorced December 21, 1945);
married Mary Welsh (a writer), March 14, 1946; children: (first
marriage) John Hadley Nicanor; (second marriage) Patrick, Gregory. Perhaps to a larger degree than that of
any other twentieth-century writer, criticism of Hemingway's work has
been colored by his own mythic persona. Indeed, he helped promote his
larger-than-life reputation as a robust, belligerent American hero who
sought to experience violence as well as Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, by strict, Congregationalist parents, Hemingway led a fairly happy, upper-middle-class childhood. Scholars note, however, that as he grew older he felt bitter toward both his parents, particularly his mother, whom he viewed as selfish and domineering. By his teens he had become interested in literature, and he wrote a weekly column for his high school newspaper and contributed poems and stories to the school magazine. Upon his graduation in 1917, he took a junior reporter position on the Kansas City Star, covering the police and hospital beats and writing feature stories. Here he began consciously refining his prose according to the Star's guidelines of compression, selectivity, precision, and immediacy. In his journalism, Hemingway demonstrated a proclivity for powerful yet utterly objective stories of violence, despair, and emotional unrest, concerns that dominated his fiction. Of tremendous impact to Hemingway's development as a writer was his ensuing participation in World War I as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy. Wounded in both legs by a shrapnel explosion near the front lines, he fell in love with the American nurse who cared for him; however, she abruptly left Hemingway for an older man. He returned to the States a decorated hero, but his triumph was overshadowed by the disillusionment of his broken romance and a stifling relationship with his parents. At Oak Park, and also in northern Michigan where his family owned a summer cottage, Hemingway drafted stories drawn from boyhood, adolescence, and wartime experiences that captured his awakening realization of life's inherent misfortunes. He eventually returned to journalism to support himself, contributing features to the Toronto Star.
Following his first marriage in 1921, Hemingway returned to Europe to launch a writing career. Sherwood Anderson, who had met and befriended Hemingway earlier in Chicago, provided him with letters of introduction to several notable writers living in Paris, the literary capital of the twenties. For the next seven years, Hemingway resided principally in France, though he traveled frequently, covering the Greco-Turkish War of 1922 and writing special-interest pieces for the Toronto paper. During this period Hemingway matured as a writer, greatly aided in his artistic development by his close contact with several of the most prominent writers of the time, including Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He eventually quit journalism, though he periodically returned to the medium, serving as a correspondent during several major wars. Hemingway's first publication, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), included an Anderson-inspired story, "My Old Man," that Edward J. O'Brien chose for his The Best Stories of 1923. Hemingway's power and originality as a writer of compressed, impressionistic sketches became apparent with his next publication, in our time (1924). A series of eighteen brief untitled chapters stemming from Hemingway's war and journalistic experiences, this work was revised, greatly expanded, and published in America a year later as In Our Time. The American version included fifteen complete short stories with the remaining vignettes serving as interchapters. By the appearance of his next story collection, Men without Women (1927), Hemingway's literary reputation--as the author of The Sun Also Rises and consequent chronicler of the "lost generation"--was all but solidified. Following the immense success of A Farewell to Arms, he was recognized as a major force in literature. While the 1930s was Hemingway's most prolific decade, he published little of lasting significance, save for the short story collection Winner Take Nothing (1933) and an assemblage of forty-nine stories, published with the play The Fifth Column, which incorporated such widely anthologized stories as "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." The 1940s was a fallow decade for Hemingway. After the publication of his variously received long novel of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his major achievement was his participation as reporter and paramilitary aide in the liberation of France from German occupation in 1944. The fifties was for Hemingway nearly as productive as the thirties, though most of the work from this period was published posthumously. By the middle of the decade, however, a variety of recurrent physical ailments had severely curtailed his creative energy. In 1960 Hemingway suffered a mental breakdown and was admitted to the Mayo Clinic for electrotherapy treatments. His depressive behavior and other illnesses persisted, and Hemingway committed suicide the following year. Although Hemingway's most significant works include such renowned novels as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls--as well as his Pulitzer Prize-winning novella, The Old Man and the Sea--critical response to these works has been varied. His short stories, however, particularly those in In Our Time, are consistently considered some of his finest efforts. The majority of these stories focus on Nick Adams, a protagonist often discussed as the quintessential Hemingway hero and the first in the line of the author's "fictional selves." Like Hemingway, Nick Adams spent much of his early youth in the Michigan woods. The early stories set in Michigan, such as "Indian Camp," "The End of Something," "The Three-Day Blow," and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," introduce Nick as a vulnerable adolescent attempting to understand a brutal, violent, and confusing world. On the surface, Nick, like all of Hemingway's protagonists, appears tough and insensitive. However, recent scholarship has determined that Nick's toughness stems not from insensitivity but from a strict moral code that functions as his sole defense against the overwhelming chaos of the world. Cleanth Brooks, Jr. and Robert Penn Warren, in their influential exposition of the short story "The Killers," noted that "it is the tough man, ... the disciplined man, who actually is aware of pathos or tragedy." Though he seems to lack spontaneous human emotion, the hero "sheathes [his sensibility] in the code of toughness" because "he has learned that the only way to hold on to `honor,' to individuality, to, even, the human order ... is to live by his code." The "code" hero is also found in Hemingway's most celebrated novels. Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises is both disillusioned and emasculated as a result of the war, and he establishes his own code of behavior because he no longer believes in the dictates of society. Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms finds order in his life through his love for a woman, maintaining his dignity even when she dies and the structure of his world collapses. Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls is an American who dedicates himself to the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War and ultimately dies for his convictions. These men demonstrate courage and perseverance in the face of adversity, thus exemplifying Hemingway's concern with fortitude and personal commitment. With the novella The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway turned from themes of love and war to focus on a lone fisherman's struggle to capture a large marlin. The protagonist, Santiago, heroically fights the elements, only to lose all but the fish's carcass to sharks. Characteristic of Hemingway's fiction, the terse, almost journalistic prose, the compressed action, and the subdued yet suggestive symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea point to a deeper meaning than appears on the surface. Hemingway stresses Santiago's heroism through subtle allusions to Christ, and the simplicity of action serves to underscore the hero's nobility. "The writer's job is to tell the
truth," Hemingway once said. When he was having difficulty writing
he reminded himself of this, as he explained in his memoirs, A
Moveable Feast (1964): "I would stand and look out over the
roofs of Paris and think, `Do not worry. You have always written before
and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence.
Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one
true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there
was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard
someone say." His endeavor to write "one true sentence"
resulted in the creation of over twenty-five books. Summing up
Hemingway's work and contribution to American literature, Robert P.
Weeks concluded: "Hemingway has won his reputation as an artist of
the first rank by operating within limits that would have stifled a
lesser writer. But within and because of these limits, he has in his
best work uttered a lyric cry that--although it may not resemble the
full orchestra of Tolstoy or the organ tones of Melville--is nonetheless
a moving and finely wrought response to our times." Writer, 1917-61. Kansas City Star,
Kansas City, MO, cub reporter, 1917-18; ambulance driver for Red Cross
Ambulance Corps in Italy, 1918-19; Co-operative Commonwealth, Chicago,
writer, 1920-21; Toronto Star, Toronto, Ontario, covered
Greco-Turkish War, 1920, European correspondent, 1921-24; covered
Spanish Civil War for North American Newspaper Alliance, 1937-38; war
correspondent in China, 1941; war correspondent in Europe, 1944-45. Pulitzer Prize, 1953, for The Old
Man and the Sea; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1954; Award of
Merit from American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1954. NOVELS CREDIT SOURCE: All
information contained herein was obtained at the Camden County Free
Library, Voorhees NJ, USA Introduction
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