Author Profile: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

BIO

From 1925 to 1929, Ernest Hemingway produced some of the most important works of 20th century fiction, including the landmark short story collection IN OUR TIME (1925) which contained "The Big Two-Hearted River." In 1926 he came out with his first true novel, THE SUN ALSO RISES (after publishing TORRENTS OF SPRING, a comic novel parodying Sherwood Anderson in 1925). He followed that book with MEN WITHOUT WOMEN in 1927; it was another book of stories which collected "The Killers" and "In Another Country." In 1929 he published A FAREWELL TO ARMS, arguably the finest novel to emerge from World War I.

THE TORRENTS OF SPRING, a short comic novel, satirized Hemingway’s early mentor Sherwood Anderson and allowed him to break his relationship with Boni & Liveright to move to Scribner’s.

In 1932, Hemingway published his book on Spanish bullfighting, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON. He completed FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS in 1940, to great critical and commercial success. It was followed by Hemingway's masterpiece THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953.  In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature. Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961.

-- Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois.

-- The second of Dr. Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway's six children, he had four sisters and one brother.

-- Hemingway attended Oak Park public schools.

-- After graduation from high school in the spring of 1917, he took a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star.

-- He tried to enlist in the army at 18 but was deferred because of poor vision.

-- Hemingway volunteered as ambulance driver and sailed for Europe in May 1918.

-- He was awarded the Italian Silver Medal for Valor.

-- In September 1921, he married Hadley Richardson.

-- As a reporter in Europe, he forged friendships with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Max Eastman, Lincoln Steffens and Wyndahm Lewis; was acquainted with the painters Miro and Picasso.

-- He worked for Ford Maddox Ford editing the Transatlantic Review.

-- After divorcing his first wife Hadley in 1927, later that year Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer, an occasional fashion reporter for the likes of Vanity Fair and Vogue.

-- Hemingway had three sons, one by Hadley, two by Pfeiffer.

-- He traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War.

-- He divorced Pfeiffer and married Martha Gellhorn in 1943.

-- Hemingway divorced his third wife Martha to marry his fourth, Mary Welsh.

-- In 1953, he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

-- In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

-- Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961.

ARTICLE

A few nights ago in a hotel room in Las Vegas on a bed strewn with Hemingway books, I lay in the dark clutching a telephone.

As I argued the pros and cons of Ernest Hemingway with my fiance, my coworkers were out drinking and gambling and eating and generally carousing...in short, behaving in a very Hemingwayesque manner. I instead took the high road. Yet as I read and thought and wrote and discussed, the irony of it struck me.

Hemingway was at home in both of these worlds.

It was never an either/or proposition for this icon of American literature. Ernest Hemingway was a man's man, full of himself, hearty and arrogant and exuberant in his likes and dislikes. He exhibited bravery in war and came home wounded. He survived one small-plane crash only to get back on the flying horse and do it again. He put much store in the value of courage and took on testosterone-laden activities with zest: big-game hunting and big-game fishing and
big-time womanizing. He loved boxing and drinking and bullfighting.

Despite these macho tendencies, Hemingway had what some people would consider a sissy job: writing.

A prodigious reader and a diligent writer, Ernest Hemingway would have felt comfortable eschewing one night of carousing to lock himself away to pore over words and sculpt sentences, and he was always ready to discuss the art of writing and the craft of rewriting. In the midst of blood and gore and violence, he saw things other writers never appeared to see: beauty in the precision of the hunt; art in the movement of the matador; ballet in the flash of the fish.

This overtly masculine man was in touch with his feminine side.

Even though the universal appeal of this Nobel-prize winning author cannot be denied, on the surface Hemingway is a writer who appeals predominantly to one gender, a proposition to which I do not generally subscribe with regard to good literature.

Hemingway's themes of war and outdoor sports such as hunting and indoor sports such as drinking seem to appeal to men more than women. In the years Hemingway wrote, and even today, a boy coming of age is met on all sides with issues of courage, whether it's the courage to stand up for himself and his beliefs or the physical courage required to push himself to the limits of pain and endurance in competition. Growing up female, however, requires a different kind of courage, one that Hemingway never really explored.

So when I told the man in my life that from what I remembered of Hemingway's books all those years ago in college, Hemingway was overrated and never spoke to me or to any woman truly, I was treated to an impassioned speech on Hemingway and his ability to illuminate the passages through which a boy must pass to become a man. I listened. Then I decided to take another look at Ernest Hemingway.

It was a reader's revelation of sorts.

While it's unlikely I will ever change my mind about the man
himself --- a man who drank too much, cheated on all his four wives, and bragged and lied about his personal exploits --- I've come to a new appreciation of Ernest Hemingway the writer. Excessive in his personal life, Hemingway was the master of defoliated language. What once seemed stylistically boring to me now stands out as hard-fought and striking in its simplicity. The masculine themes that strayed so far from my own callow experiences now touch a chord of recognition.

Reading A MOVEABLE FEAST was a new treat. Discovering the brilliance of his short stories was an unexpected joy. Rereading THE SUN ALSO RISES was proof there are reasons some books are considered classics.

Only a relatively few writers leave an indelible mark on literature, but Ernest Hemingway is one of those few. He cleared the way for so many contemporary writers it's easy to forget that the combination of his style and subject matter was brazenly unique a generation ago. He captured emotional intensity as clearly as he painted a sense of place and his observations of human nature were as keen as his hunter's eye.

He may have been a bully and even a misogynist. He may have been unforgiving of his friends, his wives, his critics, other writers and ultimately himself. He may have been part phony and part genius. Yet, as Gertrude Stein so succinctly declares in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS...

"...I have a weakness for Hemingway."

--- Jami Edwards