ERNEST HEMINGWAY 1899-1968

               Reporter, soldier, short-story writer, nov­elist, playwright, deep-sea fisherman and big game hunter, Hemingway was a man whose unique mastery of the art of writing influenced the style of an entire generation of writers. That influence spread for beyond the borders of the United States and far beyond the English language. It is an influ­ence that persists today.

                Ernest Miller Hemingway, one of six chil­dren, was born into the family of a small town doctor at Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21,1899 Hemingway’s father, a keen sports­man and ethnographer, was a doctor. His democratic views influenced Hemingway greatly. He taught his son first and fore­most to a man, and to love and understand nature. Ernest took interest in reading books from an early age. The school he was recog­nized as an exceptionally good football played and boxer. Ernest took part in all school ac­tivities. But he was adventurous and twice he ran away from home. He was also a good fisherman and was very fond of hunting. He used to hunt in the woods of northern Mich­igan. Among his friends were Indian boys.

                Later at school he began to show a fondness for literature, started writing articles for two school periodicals, and became the editor of the school’s weekly paper.

               He was active in sports; and under the guid­ance of his father, he came to love the outdoors, becoming an excellent hunter and fish­erman. His parents wanted him to become a doctor or a musician, but after graduation from high school, he began his writing career in a sports reporter for the Kansas CityStar.

                 When the United States entered World War I, Hemingway left his job and tried to enlist in the army. After repeated rejections because of his youth, he was finally accept­ed as an ambulance driver with the Red Cross* in Italy.

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* Red Cross— international relief agency founded by the Ge­neva Convention in 1863 at the instigation of the Swiss doc­tor Henri Dunant (1828-1910) to assist the wounded and prisoners in war.

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                  Shortly before his 19^th birthday he was badly wounded by enemy fire and spent several weeks in a hospital in Milan. This experience would provide material for his future novel A Farewell to Arms. After leav­ing the hospital, he enlisted in the Italian Arditi, an infantry unit, and served until the Armistice* on November 1,1918.

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* Armistice — cessation of hostilities with awaiting a peace settlement. The Armistice refers specifically to the end of World War I between Germany and the Allies on 11 No­vember, 1918.

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                   He returned to Chicago in 1919 and went to Toronto, Canada, where he worked for the Toronto Star. Two years later, he was ap­pointed to the Star’s international news bu­reau and was assigned to Paris. From 1921 to 1927, he lived in Europe where he worked hard at realizing his ambition to become a writer. Joining the literary circle of expa­triate American writers brought together by poet, author Gertrude Stein, Hemingway profited from his association with writers line her, Ezra Pound and Francis Scott Fit­zgerald*.

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* Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946) — American writer. She influ­enced Hemingway with her radical prose style.

Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885-1972) — American poet and cultural critic. He is regarded as one of the most important figures of the 20^lh-century literature, and his work revolutionized modern poetry.

Fitzgerald, F(rancis) Scott (Key) (1896-1940) — American novelist and short-story writer.

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                He wrote his first three works: Three Short Stories and Ten Poems (1923); In Our Times (1925) a collection of short stories; and The Torrents of Spring (1926), a novel, which went unnoticed by the public.

                With the publicity of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Hemingway’s first major success, his reputation as a novelist was established. This novel is considered by many critics to be his finest work. Written in an original style, the novel quickly influenced writers.

                 In 1927, Hemingway published a collection of short stories called Men Without Women. The following year he returned to the U.S., where he lived off and on for the next ten years at Key West, Florida. There he worked on A Farewell to Arms (1929). The following passage from the novel has often been pointed out as a statement of Heming­way’s world view as well as the key to the novel’s meaning: “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

                   In 1932 Hemingway published Death in the Afternoon, a moving study of bullfighting, a subject in which he had shown a constant interest both in short stories and in The Sun Also Rises. “Bullfighting” he wrote, “is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of bril­liance in the performance is left to the fight­er’s honor”.

                  From his home in Florida, Hemingway made trips, including several to Africa. During on the experiences of there African trips, he wrote The Green Hills of Africa (1935), a nonfiction book about “pursuit as happi­ness”, and two of his best short stories, The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936) and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1938). It is his short stores rather than his other works that Hemingway has received some of his highest praise.

                 At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War* in 1936, Hemingway went to Spain to gather material for a film.

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* Spanish Civil War — war (1936-1939) precipitated by mili­tary revolt led by general Franco (1892-1975) against the Republican government.

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                 The Spanish Earth, and returned to that country the next year as a correspondent for the North American News­paper Alliance. Out of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War came a play, The Fifth Column, and his longest novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). This novel emphasizes the oneness of humanity and the idea that a loss of liberty anywhere means the loss of liberty everywhere. Critics Rave described this nov­el as a study in “epic courage and compas­sion”, and in it, according to some, Heming­way reached the peak of his creative skill.

                 World War II saw Hemingway serving again in the role of war correspondent. When the war ended, he settled in Cuba where he lived until 1959.

                 During this period of his life at an old, some­what dilapidated estate called Finca Vigia, he talked with many of the fishermen at near­ly San Francisco de Paula. One of the stories he heard gave him the idea of his short nov­el, The Оld Man and the Sea(1952). The novel tells of an old Cuban fisherman who, after a run of bad luck, hooks a giant mar­lin. The story of the old man’s struggle with the fish, of his final victory which turns into defeat as sharks attack the catch and reduce it to a skeleton ends with the words “Man is not meant for defect. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” The novel led Heming­way’s receiving the Pulitzer Prize given each year for distinguished American fiction. In 1954, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature for his powerful, style — forming mastery of the art of mod­ern narration, as most recently revealed in The Old Man and the Sea.

                 During the last years of his life, Heming­way was a figure of heroic proportion. He had been honoured internationally, and his rugged life which he had lived presented the public with an image of a superman. Yet Hemingway suffered fits of depression made worse an increasingly serious stom­ach ailment. Writing was becoming impos­sible as he realized his own human weak­ness and frailties. On July 2, 1961, firing both charges of a double barreled shotgun, Hemingway committed suicide.

                 Hemingway was a man of great talent. An American critic, Carlos Baker, in his book “Ernest Hemingway. A Life Story: writes the Hemingway was a perpetual stu­dent, a profound reader, a brilliant natu­ralist and a keen observer of life around him”. Hemingway won the hearts of his readers with his stories and novels and at­tracted people by his personal qualities — his honesty and courage above all. In 1966 a memorial to him was erected in Cuba in his memory with the following words on it:

                 Best of all he liked the fall

                The leaves yellow on the cottonwood

                 Leaves floating on the trout streams

                And above the hills

                The high blue windless skies

                “Now he will be a part of them forever”.