PROJECT ON ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Synopsis
Born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero
(now in Oak Park), Illinois, Ernest Hemingway served in World War I and worked
in journalism before publishing his story collection In Our Time. He was renowned for
novels like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which
won the 1953 Pulitzer. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He committed
suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.
Early Life and Career
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born
on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois. Clarence and Grace
Hemingway raised their son in this conservative suburb of Chicago, but the
family also spent a great deal of time in northern Michigan, where they had a
cabin. It was there that the future sportsman learned to hunt, fish and
appreciate the outdoors.
In high school, Hemingway worked
on his school newspaper, Trapeze and
Tabula, writing primarily about sports. Immediately after
graduation, the budding journalist went to work for the Kansas City Star, gaining
experience that would later influence his distinctively stripped-down prose
style.
He once said, "On the Star
you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful
to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he
gets out of it in time."
Military
Experience
In 1918, Hemingway went overseas
to serve in World War I as an ambulance driver in the Italian Army. For his
service, he was awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery, but soon sustained
injuries that landed him in a hospital in Milan.
There he met a nurse named Agnes
von Kurowsky, who soon accepted his proposal of marriage, but later left him
for another man. This devastated the young writer but provided fodder for his
works "A Very Short Story" and, more famously, A Farewell to Arms.
Still nursing his injury and
recovering from the brutalities of war at the young age of 20, he returned to
the United States and spent time in northern Michigan before taking a job at
the Toronto Star.
It was in Chicago that Hemingway
met Hadley Richardson, the woman who would become his first wife. The couple
married and quickly moved to Paris, where Hemingway worked as a foreign
correspondent for the Star.
Life
in Europe
In Paris, Hemingway soon became a
key part of what Gertrude Stein would famously call "The Lost
Generation." With Stein as his mentor, Hemingway made the acquaintance of
many of the great writers and artists of his generation, such as F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso and James Joyce. In 1923, Hemingway and
Hadley had a son, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway. By this time the writer had
also begun frequenting the famous Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain.
In 1925, the couple, joining a
group of British and American expatriates, took a trip to the festival that
would later provided the basis of Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises. The novel is
widely considered Hemingway's greatest work, artfully examining the postwar
disillusionment of his generation.
Soon after the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway and
Hadley divorced, due in part to his affair with a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer,
who would become Hemingway's second wife shortly after his divorce from Hadley
was finalized. The author continued to work on his book of short stories, Men Without Women.
Critical
Acclaim
soon, Pauline became pregnant and
the couple decided to move back to America. After the birth of their son
Patrick Hemingway in 1928, they settled in Key West, Florida, but summered in
Wyoming. During this time, Hemingway finished his celebrated World War I novel A
Farewell to Arms, securing his lasting place in the literary canon.
When he wasn't writing, Hemingway
spent much of the 1930s chasing adventure: big-game hunting in Africa,
bullfighting in Spain, deep-sea fishing in Florida. While reporting on the
Spanish Civil War in 1937, Hemingway met a fellow war correspondent named
Martha Gellhorn (soon to become wife number three) and gathered material for
his next novel, For Whom the
Bell Tolls, which would eventually be nominated for the Pulitzer
Prize.
Almost predictably, his marriage
to Pauline Pfeiffer deteriorated and the couple divorced. Gellhorn and
Hemingway married soon after and purchased a farm near Havana, Cuba, which
would serve as their winter residence.
When the United States entered
World War II in 1941, Hemingway served as a correspondent and was present at
several of the war's key moments, including the D-Day landing. Toward the end
of the war, Hemingway met another war correspondent, Mary Welsh, whom he would
later marry after divorcing Martha Gellhorn.
In 1951, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, which
would become perhaps his most famous book, finally winning him the Pulitzer
Prize he had long been denied.
Personal
Struggles and Suicide
The author continued his forays
into Africa and sustained several injuries during his adventures, even
surviving multiple plane crashes.
In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize
in Literature. Even at this peak of his literary career, though, the burly
Hemingway's body and mind were beginning to betray him. Recovering from various
old injuries in Cuba, Hemingway suffered from depression and was treated for
numerous conditions such as high blood pressure and liver disease.
He wrote A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his
years in Paris, an d retired permanently to Idaho. There he continued to battle
with deteriorating mental and physical health.
Early on the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest
Hemingway committed suicide in his Ketchum home.
Hemingway left behind an impressive body of work
and an iconic style that still influences writers today. His personality and
constant pursuit of adventure loomed almost as large as his creative talent.
When asked by George Plimpton about the function of
his art, Hemingway proved once again to be a master of the "one true
sentence": "From things that have happened and from things as they
exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make
something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new
thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you
make it well enough, you give it immortality."
