Ernest Hemingway Overview

The man who would be Papa began his life in 1899 as Ernest Miller Hemingway, born in his grandfather's house in Chicago, Illinois. His father raised him to be a sporting man, a man equipped to survive in nature, with a... [more]

The man who would be Papa began his life in 1899 as Ernest Miller Hemingway, born in his grandfather's house in Chicago, Illinois. His father raised him to be a sporting man, a man equipped to survive in nature, with a love of hunting, fishing, and adventure (Hemingway would cultivate this image in his adult years, selling himself as the literary sportsman to a celebrity-hungry public). His writing career commenced in his late teens, when he served as a reporter to the Kansas City Star. While this writing stint helped to hone his craft, he received his life's education as an ambulance driver during the First World War. Despite an eye injury that prevented him from fighting, Hemingway's notoriously macho joie de vivre compelled him to enter the danger as deeply as he could, and he was seriously wounded. After the war, Hemingway returned to the States and married for the first of four times, only to make continuous trips back to the European continent to visit fellow Americans such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, whom he had met while serving with the Red Cross. He also returned on assignment as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War and later World War II. Hemingway's war experiences -- especially his love affair with a Red Cross nurse who cared for him -- provided material for much of his fiction, including "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "A Farewell to Arms" (1929), and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940). "The Sun Also Rises" is considered Hemingway's masterpiece. The characters in this first major novel capture the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in Paris. The most vital character among them is Jake, a veteran whose war wound has left him impotent and with a post-optimist attitude summed up by the phrase "Wouldn't it be nice to think so." This brutally Realist attitude is typical of the work of several other writers who came of age during the war -- including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, and Hart Crane -- known collectively as the Lost Generation. For them, America was hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and intellectually barren. They had experienced war first-hand, and now waited at Paris cafe tables in anticipation of the dawn of a new, post-war world. It is Hemingway who brought the term into popular usage by referring to the Lost Generation in the preface to "The Sun Also Rises." However, the reference is a gesture of irony, for Hemingway actually despised the appellation, which was coined by Gertrude Stein. He may have been cynical, darkened, even shell-shocked, but he certainly did not consider himself "lost." In "The Sun Also Rises," Hemingway did not write of lost or aimless people, but of human beings very much present in their modern world, occupying a small place in time, however bleak that time might be. Hemingway divided the later years of his life between adventuring around the globe and fishing near his home in Finca Vigia, Cuba. After a celebrated 30-year career as a journalist, novelist, and short-story writer, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in 1954, largely due to the success of his short novel "The Old Man and the Sea" (1952). During the late 1950s, Hemingway suffered deep depression and became unable to write. In 1960 he was hospitalized for mental illness. The writer who had lived his life as a man of action finally took one last stand, ending his frustration with the help of a double-barrel shotgun on July 2, 1961. [show less]