A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: One of the most famous American novelist, short-story writer and essayist, whose deceptively simple prose style have influenced wide range of writers. Born 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, 10 miles from Chicago, the second of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and Grace Hall's six children. Both his grandfathers had fought in the American Civil War, although Grace's father was born in Sheffield. His mother was a singing teacher and his father a doctor. The family spent their summers at a cottage on Walloon Lake in the Great Lakes region of Illinois. Hemingway's father enjoyed shooting and boxing and his son shared his interests. Ernest attended Oak Park High School where he was known as aggressive and competitive. His parents wanted him to go to the University of Illinois to study medicine, but it was 1917 and he wanted to join up and fight. He was too young, however, so he started his career as a writer in the Kansas City Star at the age of seventeen. Hemingway was enthusiastic about his work but, after seven months, he volunteered as a Red Cross driver and sailed for Europe in 1918. Whilst serving as an ambulance driver in Italy, he was badly wounded and invalided back to the US in 1919. He was awarded the Italian Silver Medal for Valour for assisting Italian soldiers after he had himself been wounded.He spent considerable time in hospitals. His affair with an American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, gave basis for the novel A farewell to arms (1929). The tragic love story and study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter was filmed first time in 1932, starring Gary Cooper, Helen Hayes, and Adolphe Menjou. In the second version from 1957, written by Ben Hecht and directed by Charles Vidor, Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones were in the leading roles. Its failure caused David O. Selznick to produce no more films. After the war Hemingway worked for a short time as a journalist in Chicago. He moved in 1921 to Paris, where he married the first of his four wives, Hadley Richardson, wrote articles for the Toronto Star, and associated with such writers as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who edited some of his texts and acted as his agent. In 1922 he went to Greece and Turkey to report on the war between those countries. In 1923 Hemingway made two trips to Spain, on the second to see bullfights at Pamplona's annual festival. During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The sun also rises (1926). In Paris he made himself fluent in French, Spanish and Italian and, in 1923, travelled to Spain. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat. Hemingway divorced his wife in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer who was a Catholic, so he converted. They moved to Key West in Florida in 1928, the same year that his father, tormented by illness and financial problems, committed suicide. The novel Farewell to Arms was published in 1929. When Hemingway met journalist Martha Gellhorn she was already interested in the anti-fascist movement in Spain. Having published his influential and passionate book on bull-fighting Death in the Afternoon in 1932, Hemingway was regarded as an expert on things Spanish so, during 1937/8, he travelled four times to Spain to report on the civil war. His journalistic expression released him from the literary stagnation he seemed to be caught in. Hemingway was a spectator of, not a participant in, the Spanish Civil War, but as many writers, he supported the cause of the Loyalist. He met in Madrid Martha Gellhorn, a war correspondent, with whom he had a romance, and who became his third wife. In To whom the bells toll (1940) returned again in Spain. The story depicted Spanish guerrillas and their American volunteer Robert Jordan. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1941, but this was vetoed by right-wing members of the committee. In addition to hunting expeditions in Africa and Wyoming, Hemingway developed a passion for deep-sea fishing in the waters off Key West, the Bahamas, and Cuba. In 1940 Hemingway bought Finca Vigia, a house outside Havana, Cuba. He armed his fishing boat, the Pilar, and formed an intelligence network to monitor Nazi activities and their U-boats in that area. In early 1941 he and Martha Gelhorn reported on the Japanese involvement in China. Unlike his other wives, she went on with her career and Hemingway was often alone. He resented this and drank. "the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action," he once wrote, "If you cannot throw it, at least you can always drink out of it.". Hemingway's drinking had started already when he was a reporter. He tolerate large amounts of alcohol and it did not affect the quality of his writing for a long time. In the late 1940s he started to hear voices in his head. When his marriage ended, Hemingway followed in 1944 the allied campaigns in Europe, taking part in the D-Day landings. Against expectations, Hemingway did not keep strictly in his role as an observer. He returned to Cuba in 1946, married Mary Welsh, a correspondent for Time magazine, whom he had met in a London resautorbusrant in 1944. During the Second World War he was a war correspondent for seven months. He seemed to view war as a great outdoor sport, and after the war became boastful and violent. In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Because of his strong action plots and spare, visually exact prose, many screen adaptations of his work have been made, including: A Farewell to Arms (1933); To Have and Have Not (1944) and the Old Man and the Sea (1958). Hemingway disliked almost all of the films of his books and was only involved with the production of the Old Man and the Sea. Across the River and Into the Trees was Hemingway's first novel in a decade and poorly received. The old man and the sea, published first in Life magazine in 1952, restored again his fame. It told a story of an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago who finally catches a giant marlin after weeks of not catching anything. As he returns to the harbor, the sharks eat the fish, lashed to his boat. The model for Santiago was a Cuban fisherman, Gregorio Fuentes, who died in January 2002, at the age of 104. Fuentes had served as the captain of Hemingway's boat Pilar in the late 1930s and was occasionally his tapster. Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column And The First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). During 1960-61, he disintegrated physically. He had high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney and liver disease. The drugs he was put on had the side effect of making him depressed. He was taken into the Mayo Clinic where he was treated with electric shock treatment that exacerbated his mental illness. On release from hospital in july 2, 1961, he committed suicide by shooting himself with his favorite shotgun in the head one morning in the hallway of his home in Ketchum, Idaho. Several of Hemingway's novels have been published posthumously. True At First Light, depiction of a safari in Kenya, appeared in July 1999. Its staggering language and self-pity reveal mostly the downfall of his famous style. |
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