By Mubashar Altaf
Ernest Hemingway Biography
Formative Years
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous
suburb of Chicago.
His father, Clarence E. Hemingway, was a doctor; his mother, who was very
religious, had given up a promising career as a singer in order to rear six children,
of whom Ernest was the third and the oldest boy.
Hemingway attended public school in Oak Park, and the family vacationed in the
north woods of Michigan, where Clarence taught Ernest hunting and fishing and a
general love of the outdoor life.
Later Hemingway would portray Oak Park's bourgeois values in an unflattering
light in stories like "Soldier's Home," and his parents' marriage was the subject of
the bitterly resentful tale "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife." On the other hand,
Hemingway wrote with nothing short of adoration about life "Up in Michigan," in
the story of that name and many others featuring his fictional alter ego Nick
Adams. Clarence Hemingway would commit suicide in 1928.
Upon graduation from high school, Hemingway left Oak Park for a stint as a
reporter at the highly respected daily newspaper the Kansas City Star. .T Shortly
afterward, he enlisted in a Red Cross ambulance corps stationed on the Austrian
front in Italy during the last year of the First World War.
Hemingway was wounded almost immediately (he was delivering cigarettes and
chocolate to Italian soldiers beyond the front lines) and sent to an American
hospital in Milan,where he fell in love with an American nurse named Agnes von
Kurowsy,, ; these events would inspire A Farewell to Arms.
After the war, Hemingway returned to the States in hopes of beginning a career of
one kind or another that would support him and Agnes, whom he planned to marry.
That plan was shattered when she wrote from Europe to say that she'd fallen in
love with another man.
Instead, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson in 1921; shortly thereafter, the
couple moved to Paris, where the first of the writer's three sons was born.
All the while, Hemingway was reading as much as he could, writing stories and
poems, and trying to find his voice as a writer — a process that suffered a
devastating setback when a suitcase containing all the copies of all the stories he
had written to date (four years' work) was stolen from Hadley on a train to
Switzerland.
Education
Hemingway's formal education did not extend beyond high school in Oak Park,
where he edited the school paper.
His training as a writer continued, however, during his time as a reporter in Kansas
City and as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star.
He covered the Greek-Turkish War of 1920, and the experience would inspire
some of the most striking and effective of the inter-chapter vignettes in
Hemingway's groundbreaking debut story collection, In Our Time.
Even more influential, perhaps, were the writers Hemingway met while living in
Paris during the 1920s: the Irishman James Joyce and the American expatriates
Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Gertrude Stein.
Hemingway liked to claim that he learned about writing from the post-
Impressionist paintings of Cezanne — an intriguing notion, though he never made
it clear exactly what Cezanne taught him.
(Post-Impressionism (also spelled Postimpressionism) is a predominantly French
art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, Post-Impressionism
emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction
of light and colour.)
He learned about military tactics from career soldiers met in World War I,
bullfighting from Spanish matadors, big-game hunting from a British guide in East
Africa, and deep-sea fishing from a native of the Bahamas.
As any reader of his work knows, he also was fascinated by food and drink; the
pages of Hemingway's fiction and nonfiction are filled to overflowing with
references to foreign dishes and obscure wines and liqueurs.
Finally, he was a quick study at languages and was relatively fluent in quite a few.
Literary Writing
Hemingway's first book published in the United States, In Oct Time (1925), was a
collection of stories (like "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted three) linked by
the character of Nick Adams, who appears in many of them; by the short vignettes
between the stories that tell a story of their own; by the theme of behavior in the
face of life-threatening violence; and by the now-famous Hemingway style.
The book was acclaimed upon its publication, and it remains a classic.
The Torrents of Spring, a novella that attempts inia rather belaboured fashion to
satirize the work of the American writer Sherwood Anderson,
Followed in 1926, as did Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, a novel about
expatriate life in Paris and Spain after World War I.
In both subject and style, the latter book is a genuinely radical work of Modern art.
(The specifics of its central conflict are never explicitly stated, for instance.)
The Sun Also Rises is probably the most-admired of all the writer's books.
Men without Women (1927) comprises stories of boxers and bullfighters,
including "The Undefeated," "The Killers," and "Fifty Grand." Men without
Women also contains "Hills like White Elephants," a story told almost entirely in
dialogue.
Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms toned down Hemingway's revolutionary
style to yield a more conventional — and a more moving — book than the writer
had produced up to that time.
The result was the novel's widespread popular success as well as worldwide fame
for the author himself.
The story collection Winner Take Nothing followed in 1933. Less consistently
satisfying than the two collections that preceded it, Winner Take Nothing
nevertheless contained more formal experimentation, like the verbatim foreign
dialogue in "Wine of Wyoming."
At this point in his career, Hemingway seems to have become distracted by his
own celebrity. Eight years would pass between A Farewell to Arms and the writer's
next novel, the slight and poorly received To Have and Have Not (1937) — which
is really a collection of linked short stories that share a setting (Cuba and Key
West) rather than a true novel.
In the interim, Hemingway wrote two books of nonfiction: a loose, baggy treatise
on bullfighting called Death in the Afternoon (1932) and The Green Hills of Africa
(1935), which was about big-game hunting.
I All the while, the Hemingway legend was growing, thanks in no small part to the
author's own embellishments (and sometimes out-and-out lies) about his past.
Finally, in 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls appeared. The book is a big novel about
the Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway had covered as a correspondent and
documentary filmmaker.
Critics accused it, and him, of self-parody — and indeed, the novel's style is often
unbearably mannered.
Still, the best-selling For Whom the Bell Tolls stands among the early stories and
his first two novels as Hemingway's main storytelling achievements.
During the Second World War, Hemingway occupied himself by reporting from
Europe.
In 1950, he published another book, the critically lambasted Across the River and
Into the Trees.
He recovered somewhat with The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a novella about a
Cuban fisherman's struggle with a great marlin, which might be Hemingway's
answer to Moby-Dick.
His most popular work, The Old Man and the Sea was the last Ernest Hemingway
book to be published before the author's suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2,
1961.
A Moveable Feast, his charming memoir of the years spent with other expatriates
in Paris during the 1920s, appeared three years later.
Hemingway's fame, and the public's desire for more of his work, continues to be so
formidable that his executors have brought out a number of books since his death
that the writer himself had not considered fit for publication.
Islands in the Stream (1970) reprises To Have and Have Not's Caribbean setting.
The Garden of Eden (1986), about a menage a trois, dramatizes the author's
fascination with androgyny hinted at in The Sun Also Rises and near thelend of A
Farewell to Arms, as well as in stories like "The Sea Change."
The Complete Short Stories: The Finca yigia Edition (1987) contains some of the
author's unpublished short fiction. And 1999's True at First Light either reports on
or imagines an affair between a Hemingway-like hero and an African girl.
Honors and Awards
The most influential American writer of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway
was rewarded throughout his life for his achievements.
Upon the appearance of his first published stories, he received the kudos of his
literary peers, giants like James Joyce and Ezra Pound.
With the publication of A Farewell to Arms, he achieved bestsellerdom.
By the time For Whom the Bell Tolls appeared, "Papa" Hemingway was
recognized worldwide by millions who had never read a word of his prose; he had
achieved a degree of celebrity that had never been approached by a literary writer
and has not been matched since.
Near the end of his life, the adulation was made explicit, as The Old Man and the
Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. The following year, Hemingway won
the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of
narration." Though his popularity has diminished somewhat in the past quarter-
century due to charges of sexism and brutality in his life and work, Ernest
Hemingway's influence lives on.
(Sexism means prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women,
I on the basis of sex).
