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Ernest Hemingway

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

   CAPTION: Ernest Hemingway

   Ernest Hemingway, 1950
   Born: July 21, 1899
   Oak Park, Illinois
   Died: July 2, 1961
   Ketchum, Idaho
   Occupation(s): Writer and journalist
   Literary movement: The Lost Generation
   Influences: Gertrude Stein, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pío Baroja, Sherwood
   Anderson, Theodore Dreiser
   Influenced: Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, Bret
   Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland, Charles Bukowski

   Ernest Miller Hemingway ( July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American
   novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His distinctive writing
   style is characterized by economy and understatement and had a
   significant influence on the development of twentieth century fiction
   writing. Hemingway's protagonists are typically stoics, often seen as
   projections of his own character—men who must show "grace under
   pressure." Many of his works are considered classics in the canon of
   American literature.

   Hemingway, nicknamed "Papa," was part of the 1920s expatriate community
   in Paris, as described in his memoir A Moveable Feast, and was known as
   part of "the Lost Generation," a name he popularized. He led a
   turbulent social life, was married four times, and allegedly had
   various romantic relationships during his lifetime. Hemingway received
   the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea. He received the
   Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. In 1961, he committed suicide. He
   was 61 years old.

Early Life and Writing Experience

   A baby picture, c. 1900
   Enlarge
   A baby picture, c. 1900

   Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, US,
   a suburb of Chicago. Oak Park at the time was actually Cicero, Illinois
   which was split up some years later into Chicago and Oak Park.
   Hemingway was the first son and the second of six children born to
   Clarence Edmonds ("Doctor Ed") and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway's
   physician father attended to the birth of Ernest and blew a horn on his
   front porch to announce to the neighbors that his wife had borne a baby
   boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by
   Ernest's widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, an English
   immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived with the family. Hemingway
   was his namesake.

   Hemingway's semi-neurotic mother had considerable singing talent and
   had once aspired to an opera career and earned money giving voice and
   music lessons. She was domineering and narrowly religious, mirroring
   the strict Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had
   "wide lawns and narrow minds." His mother had wanted to bear twins, and
   when this did not happen, she dressed young Ernest and his sister
   Marcelline (eighteen months his senior) in similar clothes and with
   similar hairstyles, maintaining the pretense of the two children being
   "twins." Grace Hemingway perhaps further 'feminised' her son in his
   youth by calling him "Ernestine." Though much is made of this by
   biographers, male infants and toddlers of the Victorian middle-class
   were often dressed as females. Many themes in Hemingway's work point to
   destructive interactions between male and female sexual partners (cf. "
   Hills Like White Elephants"), within marital unions (cf. "Now I Lay
   Me"), and among most other combinations of men and women (cf. " The Sun
   Also Rises"); in addition certain posthumously published pieces contain
   ambiguous treatment of gender roles. However, the connection between
   Hemingway's depiction of these human conditions and his own early
   childhood experiences is not presumptively established.

   While his mother hoped that her son would develop an interest in music,
   Hemingway adopted his father's outdoorsy interests of hunting, fishing,
   and camping in the woods and lakes of northern Michigan. The family
   owned a house called Windemere on Michigan's Walloon Lake and often
   spent summers vacationing there. These early experiences in close
   contact with nature would instill in Hemingway a lifelong passion for
   outdoor adventure and for living in remote or isolated areas.

   Ernest Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School from
   September, 1913 until graduation in June of 1917. He excelled both
   academically and athletically; he boxed, played football, and displayed
   particular talent in English classes. His first writing experience was
   writing for "Trapeze" and "Tabula" (the school's newspaper and original
   literary magazine, respectively) in his junior year, then serving as
   editor in his senior year.

   After high school, Hemingway did not want to go to college. Instead, at
   age eighteen, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for The
   Kansas City Star (1917). Although he worked at the newspaper for only
   six months (October 17, 1917-April 30, 1918), throughout his lifetime
   he used the guidance from the Star's style guide as a foundation for
   his writing style: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs.
   Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." In 1999, the
   centennial year of Hemingway's birth, The Star named Hemingway its top
   reporter of the last hundred years. Some readers felt that this was
   more an honorary award than one actually earned on merit by the then
   young and short-term reporter.

World War I

   A young Hemingway in his World War I uniform
   Enlarge
   A young Hemingway in his World War I uniform

   Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months, and, against
   his father's wishes, tried to join the United States Army to see action
   in World War I. He supposedly failed the medical examination due to
   poor vision (there is no record of this), and instead joined the Red
   Cross Ambulance Corps. En route to the Italian front, he stopped in
   Paris, which was under constant bombardment from German artillery.
   Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida,
   Hemingway tried to get as close to combat as possible.

   Soon after arriving on the Italian Front, he witnessed the brutalities
   of war; on his first day of duty, an ammunition factory near Milan blew
   up. Hemingway had to pick up the human remains, mostly women who worked
   there. This first, extremely cruel encounter with death left him
   shaken. The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror; for
   example, one of them, Eric Dorman-Smith, quoted to him a line from Part
   Two of Shakespeare's Henry IV: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die
   but once; we owe God a death...and let it go which way it will, he that
   dies this year is quit for the next." (Hemingway, for his part, would
   quote this very same Shakespearean line in The Short Happy Life of
   Francis Macomber, one of his famous African short stories.) In another
   instance, a 50-year-old soldier, to whom Hemingway said, "You're troppo
   vecchio [too old] for this war, pop," replied, "I can die as well as
   any man."

   At the Italian Front on 8 July 1918, Hemingway was wounded delivering
   supplies to soldiers, which ended his career as an ambulance driver.
   Hemingway was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell that left
   fragments in his legs, and by a burst of machine-gun fire. He was later
   awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from
   the Italian government for, while injured, dragging a wounded Italian
   soldier to safety. His survival was helped by the fact that he was able
   to plug his wounds with cigarette butts, stanching the flow of blood.

   After this experience, Hemingway convalesced in a Milan hospital run by
   the American Red Cross, where there was very little to do for
   entertainment. Hemingway often drank heavily and read newspapers to
   pass the time. Here he met Sister Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington,
   D.C., one of eighteen nurses attending groups of four patients each.
   Hemingway fell in love with Sister Agnes, who was more than six years
   older than him, but their relationship did not survive his return to
   the United States; instead of following Hemingway to the U.S. as
   originally planned, she became romantically involved with an Italian
   officer and this left an indelible mark on Hemingway's psyche. These
   events provided inspiration for and were fictionalized in one of
   Hemingway's early novels, A Farewell to Arms.

Literary aftermath of WWI

First novels and other early works

   Ernest Hemingway's apartment in 1921 in Chicago, 1239 North Dearborn.
   Enlarge
   Ernest Hemingway's apartment in 1921 in Chicago, 1239 North Dearborn.

   After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park. Driven from the United
   States in part due to prohibition, in 1920 he took a job in Toronto,
   Ontario, at the Toronto Star. He worked there as a freelancer, staff
   writer, and foreign correspondent. It was in Toronto that Hemingway
   befriended fellow Star reporter Morley Callaghan. Callaghan had begun
   writing short stories at this time and showed them to Hemingway, who
   praised it as fine work. Callaghan and Hemingway would later reunite in
   Paris.

   For a short time from 1920 to 1921, Hemingway lived on the near north
   side of Chicago working for a small newspaper. In 1921, Hemingway
   married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. In September, he moved to a
   cramped fourth floor apartment at 1239 North Dearborn in a run-down
   section of Chicago's near north side. The building still stands with a
   plaque on the front of it calling it "the Hemingway Apartment." Hadley
   found it dark and depressing, and, partly because of this, the
   Hemingways decided to live abroad for a time. In December of 1921
   Hemingway left Chicago and Oak Park, never to live there again.

   At the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris, where
   Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the Star. After Hemingway's
   return to Paris, Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Gertrude
   Stein. She became his mentor and introduced him to the "Parisian Modern
   Movement" then ongoing in Montparnasse Quarter; this was the beginning
   of the American expatriate circle that became known as the Lost
   Generation, a term popularized by Hemingway in the epigraph to his
   novel, The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir A Moveable Feast. Hemingway's
   other influential mentor was Ezra Pound, the founder of imagism.
   Hemingway later said in reminiscence of this eclectic group, "Ezra was
   right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were
   never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right." The group
   often frequented Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 12 Rue
   de l'Odéon. After the 1922 publication and American banning of
   colleague James Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway used Toronto-based friends
   to smuggle copies of the novel into the United States. Hemingway's own
   first book, called Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), was published in
   Paris by Robert McAlmon. In the same year, during a brief return to
   Toronto, Hemingway's first son was born. Hemingway asked Gertrude Stein
   to be little John's godmother. Busy supporting a family, he became
   bored with the Toronto Star and resigned on January 1, 1924.

   Hemingway's American literary debut came with the publication of the
   short story cycle In Our Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute
   the interchapters of the American version were initially published in
   Europe as in our time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway,
   reaffirming to him that his minimalist style could be accepted by the
   literary community. " Big Two-Hearted River" is the collection's
   best-known story.
   Gertrude Stein (pictured here in a portrait by Pablo Picasso) was a
   long-time mentor of Hemingway and served as an important influence on
   his style and literary development.
   Enlarge
   Gertrude Stein (pictured here in a portrait by Pablo Picasso) was a
   long-time mentor of Hemingway and served as an important influence on
   his style and literary development.

   In April of 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby,
   Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald at the Dingo Bar. Fitzgerald and
   Hemingway were at first close friends, often drinking and talking
   together. They frequently exchanged manuscripts, and Fitzgerald tried
   to do much to advance Hemingway's career and the publication of his
   first collections of stories, although the relationship later cooled
   and became more competitive. Fitzgerald's wife Zelda, however, disliked
   Hemingway from the start. Openly describing him as "bogus" and "phoney
   as a rubber cheque" and asserting that his macho persona was a facade,
   she became irrationally convinced that Hemingway was homosexual and
   accused her husband of having an affair with him.

   Whether or not Zelda Fitzgerald's assessment of the relationship
   between the two men was correct, it has been postulated in some sources
   that Hemingway's well-documented homophobia and his frequent attacks on
   openly gay individuals, such as Jean Cocteau, was over-compensation for
   his own latent homosexuality. In one such instance, an anecdote told by
   Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet (known in the
   Parisian literary circles as "Monsieur Bébé") with decadence for his
   tryst with a model: "Bébé est vicieuse. Il aime les femmes." ("Baby is
   depraved. He likes women." [Note the use of the feminine adjective]).
   Radiguet, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his
   career, being a writer "who knew how to make his career not only with
   his pen but with his pencil," a salacious and phallic allusion. The
   proposed argument is that the rage against Cocteau and Radiguet (whose
   relationship has been heavily contested in other sources) shows an
   inherent hostility against homosexuals which also becomes a central
   theme of much of his short fiction, including "The Sea Change".

   These relationships and long nights of excessive drinking provided
   inspiration for Hemingway's first successful novel, The Sun Also Rises
   (1926), which took him only six weeks to finish at his favorite
   restaurant in Montparnasse, La Closerie des Lilas. The novel was
   semi-autobiographical in nature, following a group of expatriate
   Americans as they ambled around Europe. The novel was a success and met
   with critical acclaim. While Hemingway had initially claimed that the
   novel was an obsolete form of literature, he was apparently inspired to
   write it after reading Fitzgerald's manuscript for The Great Gatsby.

   Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline
   Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic from Piggott, Arkansas. Pfeiffer was
   an occasional fashion reporter, publishing in magazines such as Vanity
   Fair and Vogue. Hemingway converted to Catholicism himself at this
   time. That year saw the publication of Men Without Women, a collection
   of short stories, containing " The Killers", one of Hemingway's
   best-known and most-anthologized stories. In 1928 Hemingway and
   Pfeiffer moved to Key West, Florida, to begin their new life together.
   However, their new life was soon interrupted by yet another tragic even
   in Hemingway's life.

   In 1928, Hemingway's father, Clarence, troubled with diabetes and
   financial instabilities, committed suicide using an old Civil War
   pistol. This suicide caused great hurt for Hemingway; he immediately
   traveled to Oak Park to arrange the funeral and caused controversy by
   vocalizing what he thought to be the Catholic view, that suicides go to
   Hell. At about the same time, Harry Crosby, founder of the Black Sun
   Press and friend of Hemingway from his days in Paris, also committed
   suicide. In that same year, Hemingway's second son, Patrick, was born
   in Kansas City (his third son, Gregory, would be born to the couple a
   few years later). It was a Caesarean birth after difficult labor,
   details that were incorporated into the concluding scene of his novel A
   Farewell to Arms.

   Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms details the romance between
   Frederic Henry, an American soldier, and Catherine Barkley, a British
   nurse. The novel is heavily autobiographical in nature: the plot is
   directly inspired by his experience with Sister von Kurowsky in Milan;
   the intense labor pains of his second wife, Pauline, in the birth of
   Hemingway's son Patrick inspired Catherine's labor in the novel; the
   real-life Kitty Cannell inspired the fictional Helen Ferguson; the
   priest was based on Don Giuseppe Bianchi, the priest of the 69th and
   70th regiments of the Brigata Ancona. While the inspiration of the
   character Rinaldi is obscure, curiously, he had already appeared in In
   Our Time. A Farewell to Arms was published at a time when many other
   World War I books were prominent, including Frederic Manning's Her
   Privates We, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front,
   Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All
   That. The success of A Farewell to Arms allowed Hemingway to become
   financially independent.

Early critical interplay

   Hemingway's early works sold well and were generally received favorably
   by critics. This success elicited some crude and pretentious behaviour
   from Hemingway, even in these formative years of his career. For
   example, he began to tell F. Scott Fitzgerald how to write; he also
   claimed that the English novelist Ford Madox Ford was sexually
   impotent. Hemingway in turn was the subject of much criticism. The
   journal Bookman attacked him as a dirty writer. According to
   Fitzgerald, McAlmon, the publisher of his first non-commercial book,
   labeled Hemingway "a fag and a wife-beater" and claimed that Pauline
   was a lesbian (she is alleged to have had lesbian affairs after their
   divorce). Gertrude Stein criticized him in her book The Autobiography
   of Alice B. Toklas, suggesting that he had derived his prose style from
   her own and from Sherwood Anderson's.

   Max Eastman disparaged Hemingway harshly, asking him to "come out from
   behind that false hair on the chest" (these accusations led to a
   physical confrontation between the two in the offices of Scribners that
   Maxwell Perkins would witness and later describe in a letter to Scott
   Fitzgerald). Eastman would go on to write an essay entitled Bull in the
   Afternoon, a satire of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Another
   facet of Eastman's criticism consisted in the suggestion that Hemingway
   ought to give up his lonely, tight-lipped stoicism and write about
   contemporary social affairs. Hemingway did so for at least a short
   time; his article Who Murdered the Vets? for New Masses, a leftist
   magazine, and To Have and Have Not displayed a certain heightened
   social awareness.

   Of criticism, Hemingway said, "You can write anytime people will leave
   you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be
   ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you
   are in love," in an interview in The Paris Review, with its founder,
   George Plimpton, in 1958.

Key West & the Spanish Civil War

   Hemingway posing for a dust jacket photo by Lloyd Arnold for "For Whom
   The Bell Tolls," at the Sun Valley Lodge, Idaho, late 1939
   Enlarge
   Hemingway posing for a dust jacket photo by Lloyd Arnold for "For Whom
   The Bell Tolls," at the Sun Valley Lodge, Idaho, late 1939

   Following the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway moved to Key West,
   Florida, where he established his first American home. From his old
   stone house—a wedding present from Pauline's uncle—Hemingway fished in
   the Dry Tortugas waters with his longtime friend Waldo Peirce, went to
   the famous bar Sloppy Joe's, and traveled occasionally to Spain,
   gathering material for Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing.

   Death in the Afternoon, a book about bullfighting, was published in
   1932. Hemingway had become a bullfighting aficionado after seeing the
   Pamplona fiesta of 1925, fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises. In Death
   in the Afternoon, Hemingway extensively discussed the metaphysics of
   bullfighting: the ritualized, almost religious practice. In his
   writings on Spain he was influenced by the Spanish master Pío Baroja
   (when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he traveled to see Baroja, then on
   his death bed, specifically to tell him he thought Baroja deserved the
   prize more than he).

   A safari in the fall of 1933 led him to Mombasa, Nairobi, and Machakos
   in Kenya, moving on from there to Tanzania where he hunted in the
   Serengeti, around Lake Manyara and West and Southeast of the
   present-day Tarangire National Park. 1935 saw the publication of Green
   Hills of Africa, an account of his African safari. The Snows of
   Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were the
   fictionalized results of his African experiences.

   In 1937 Hemingway traveled to Spain in order to report on the Spanish
   Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. While in Spain,
   Hemingway broke his friendship with John Dos Passos because Dos Passos
   kept reporting despite warning on the atrocities, not only of the
   fascist Nationalists whom Hemingway disliked, but also of the elected,
   left-leaning Republicans whom Hemingway favored. In this circumstance
   Hemingway has been linked to reporter Herbert Matthews. Hemingway also
   began to question his Catholicism at this time, eventually leaving the
   church (though friends indicate that he had "funny ties" to Catholicism
   for the rest of his life). The war also caused strain in Hemingway's
   marriage to Pauline Pfieffer. Pfieffer was a devout Catholic, and as
   such she side with the fascist, pro-catholic regime of Franco. This was
   directly opposed to Hemingway's support for the Republican
   revolutionaries. During this time Hemingway also wrote a little known
   essay, The Denunciation, which would not be published until 1969 within
   a collection of stories, the Fifth Column and Four Stories of the
   Spanish Civil War. The story seems autobiographical, thus suggesting
   that Hemingway might have been an informant for the Republic as well as
   a weapons instructor during the war.

   Some health problems characterized this period of Hemingway's life: an
   anthrax infection, a cut eyeball, a gash in his forehead, grippe,
   toothache, hemorrhoids; kidney trouble from fishing in Spain, torn
   groin muscle, finger gashed to the bone in an accident with a punching
   ball, lacerations (to arms, legs, and face) from a ride on a runaway
   horse through a deep Wyoming forest, and a broken arm from a car
   accident.

The Forty-Nine Stories

   In 1938—along with his only full-length play, entitled The Fifth
   Column—49 stories were published in the collection The Fifth Column and
   the First Forty-Nine Stories. Hemingway's intention was, as he openly
   stated in his own foreword to the collection, to write more. Many of
   the stories that make up this collection can be found in other abridged
   collections, including In Our Time, Men Without Women, Winner Take
   Nothing, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

   Some of the collection's important stories include Old Man at the
   Bridge, On The Quai at Smyrna, Hills Like White Elephants, One Reader
   Writes, The Killers and (perhaps most famously) A Clean, Well-Lighted
   Place. While these stories are rather short, the book also includes
   much longer stories. Among these the most famous are The Snows of
   Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

   Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Nationalists defeated the
   Republicans and the Spanish Civil War ended in the spring of 1939.
   Hemingway had lost an adopted homeland to Franco's fascist
   Nationalists, and would later lose his beloved Key West, Florida home
   due to his 1940 divorce. A few weeks after the divorce, Hemingway
   married his companion of four years in Spain, Martha Gellhorn, as his
   third wife. His novel For Whom The Bell Tolls was published in 1940.
   The novel was written in 1939 in Cuba and Key West, and was finished in
   July, 1940. The long work, which takes place during the Spanish Civil
   War, was based on real events (The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh
   Thomas) and tells of an American named Robert Jordan fighting with
   Spanish guerrillas on the side of the Republicans. It was largely based
   upon Hemingway's experience of living in Spain and reporting on the
   Spanish Civil War. It is one of Hemingway's most notable literary
   accomplishments. The title is taken from the penultimate paragraph of
   John Donne's Meditation XVII.

World War II and its aftermath

   The United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941, and for the
   first time in his life, Hemingway sought to take part in naval warfare.

   Aboard the Pilar, now a Q-Ship, Hemingway's crew was charged with
   sinking German submarines threatening the shipping off the coasts of
   Cuba and the United States (Martha Gellhorn always viewed the
   sub-hunting as an excuse for Hemingway and his friends to get gas and
   booze for fishing). As the FBI took over Caribbean counter-espionage—
   J. Edgar Hoover was suspicious of Hemingway from the start, and would
   become more so later—Ernest went to Europe as a war correspondent for
   Collier's magazine.

   Hemingway, who was a correspondent for Collier's Weekly, observed the
   D-Day landings from an LCVP (landing craft), although he was not
   allowed to go ashore. He later became angry that his wife, Martha
   Gellhorn—by then more a rival war correspondent than a wife—had managed
   to get ashore in the early hours of June 7th dressed as a nurse, after
   she had crossed the Atlantic to England in a ship loaded with
   explosives. Still later, at Villedieu-les-Poêles, he allegedly threw
   three grenades into a cellar where SS officers were hiding. Hemingway
   acted as an unofficial liaison officer at Château de Rambouillet, and
   afterwards formed his own partisan group which, in his telling, took
   part in the liberation of Paris. This claim has been challenged by many
   historians, who say the only thing Hemingway liberated was the Ritz
   Hotel Bar. Nevertheless, he was without question on the scene.

   After the war, Hemingway started work on The Garden of Eden, which was
   never finished and would be published posthumously in much-abridged
   form in 1986. At one stage, he planned a major trilogy which was to
   comprise "The Sea When Young", "The Sea When Absent" and "The Sea in
   Being" (the latter eventually published in 1952 as The Old Man and the
   Sea). He spent time in a small town in Italy called Acciaroli (located
   apprx. 136km south of Naples), where he was often seen walking around
   town, bottle in hand. Acciaroli was predominantly known as a fishing
   village, and it was here where Hemingway conceived of the idea for "The
   Old Man and the Sea." Hemingway became fascinated with Antonio
   Masarone, an old fisherman whose Italian nickname, "Mastracchio",
   translated as "Old Man." There was also a "Sea-Chase" story; three of
   these pieces were edited and stuck together as the
   posthumously-published novel Islands in the Stream (Hemingway) (1970).

   Newly divorced from Gellhorn after four years of contentious marriage,
   Hemingway married the war correspondent Mary Welsh, whom he had met
   overseas in 1944. Hemingway's first novel after For Whom the Bell Tolls
   was Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), set in post-World War
   II Venice. He derived the title from the last words of American Civil
   War Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Enamored of a young Italian
   girl ( Adriana Ivancich) at the time, Hemingway wrote Across the River
   and Into the Trees as a romance between a war-weary Colonel Cantwell
   (based on his friend, then Colonel, Major General Charles T. Lanham)
   and the young Renata (clearly based on Adriana; "Renata" means "reborn"
   in Italian). The novel received largely bad reviews, many of which
   accused Hemingway of tastelessness, stylistic ineptitude, and
   sentimentality. Perhaps the last charge was the truest, and fit an
   emerging pattern: Hemingway was growing old. But 'Across the River' has
   its latter-day defenders nonetheless.

Later years

   One section of the above-mentioned sea trilogy was published as The Old
   Man and the Sea in 1952. That novella's enormous success satisfied and
   fulfilled Hemingway. It earned him both the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and
   the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Upon receiving the Nobel prize,
   he noted with uncharacteristic humbleness that he would have been
   "happy;happier...if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer
   Isak Dinesen," referring to Danish writer Karen Blixen. These awards
   helped to restore his international reputation.

   Then, his legendary bad luck struck once again; on a safari he suffered
   injuries in two successive plane crashes. Hemingway's injuries were
   serious; he sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg, had a grave
   concussion, temporarily lost vision in his left eye (and the hearing in
   his left ear), had paralysis of the sphincter, a crushed vertebra,
   ruptured liver, spleen and kidney, and first degree burns on his face,
   arms, and leg. Some American newspapers mistakenly ran his obituary
   thinking he had been killed in the accidents .

   As if this were not enough, he was badly injured one month later in a
   bushfire accident which left him with second degree burns on his legs,
   front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. The pain left him in
   prolonged anguish, and he was unable to travel to Stockholm to accept
   his Nobel Prize.

   A glimmer of hope came with the discovery of some of his old
   manuscripts from 1928 in the Ritz cellars, which were transformed into
   A Moveable Feast. Although some of his energy seemed to be restored,
   severe drinking problems kept him down. His blood pressure and
   cholesterol were perilously high, he suffered from aortal inflammation,
   and his depression, aggravated by the drinking, was worsening.

   He also lost his Finca Vigía, his estate outside Havana, Cuba that he
   had owned for over twenty years, and was forced to go into exile in
   Ketchum, Idaho, when the conflict in Cuba began to escalate. And so the
   final chapter began—with Hemingway under surveillance from the American
   government for his residence and activities in Cuba.

   On 26 February 1960, Ernest Hemingway was unable to get his
   bullfighting narrative The Dangerous Summer to the publishers. He
   therefore had his wife Mary summon his friend, Life Magazine bureau
   head Will Lang Jr., to leave Paris and come to Spain. Hemingway
   persuaded Lang to let him print the manuscript, along with a picture
   layout, before it came out in hardcover. Although not a word of it was
   on paper, the proposal was agreed upon. The first part of the story
   appeared in Life Magazine on September 5, 1960, with the remaining
   installments being printed in successive issues.

   Hemingway was upset by the photographs in his The Dangerous Summer
   article. He was receiving treatment in Ketchum, Idaho for high blood
   pressure and liver problems—and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)
   for depression and his continued paranoia, although this may in fact
   have helped to precipitate his suicide, since he reportedly suffered
   significant memory loss as a result of the shock treatments. He also
   lost weight, his 6-foot (183 cm) frame appearing gaunt at 170 pounds
   (77 kg).

Suicide

   Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received ECT
   treatment again; but, some three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, he
   took his own life on the morning of July 2, 1961 at his home in
   Ketchum, Idaho, with a shotgun blast to the head. Judged not mentally
   responsible for his action of suicide, he was buried in a Roman
   Catholic service. Hemingway himself blamed the ECT treatments for
   "putting him out of business" by destroying his memory; and medical and
   scholarly opinion has been respectfully attentive to this view.

   Other members of Hemingway's immediate family also committed suicide,
   including his father, Clarence Hemingway, his siblings Ursula and
   Leicester, and later his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway. Some believe
   that certain members of Hemingway's paternal line had a genetic
   condition or hereditary disease known as haemochromatosis, in which an
   excess of iron concentration in the blood causes damage to the pancreas
   and also causes depression or instability in the cerebrum. Hemingway's
   physician father is known to have developed bronze diabetes owing to
   this condition in the years prior to his suicide at age fifty-nine.
   Some think Hemingway suffered from bipolar disorder. Throughout his
   life Hemingway was a heavy drinker and succumbed to alcoholism in his
   twilight years.

   Ernest Hemingway is interred in the town cemetery in Ketchum, at the
   north end of town. A memorial, erected in 1966, is just off of Trail
   Creek Road, one mile northeast of the Sun Valley Lodge.

Wives

     * Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. Married September 3, 1921, divorced
       April 4, 1927.

                Son, John Hadley, Nicanor (Bumby) was born on October 10,
                1923.

     * Pauline Pfeiffer. Married May 10, 1927, divorced November 4, 1940.

                Son, Patrick, was born on June 28, 1929.
                Son, Gregory Hancock (called 'Gig' by Hemingway; later
                called himself Gloria), was born on November 12, 1931.

     * Martha Gellhorn. Married November 21, 1940, divorced December 21,
       1945.

     * Mary Welsh. Married March 14, 1946.

                On 19 August, 1946, Mary miscarried Hemingway’s unborn
                child due to ectopic pregnancy.

Posthumous publications

   Ernest Hemingway was a prolific letter writer, and in 1981 many of
   these were published by Scribner in Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters
   1917-1961. It was met with some controversy as Hemingway himself stated
   he never wished to publish his letters; however the letters provide
   detail and personality that make the volume more engaging than most
   Hemingway biographies. Further letters would later be published in a
   book of his correspondence with his editor Max Perkins, The Only Thing
   that Counts [1996].

   Hemingway was still writing new works up to the time of his death in
   1961. All of these unfinished works which were Hemingway's sole
   creation have been published posthumously; they are A Moveable Feast,
   Islands in the Stream, The Nick Adams Stories (portions of which were
   previously unpublished), The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden.
   In a note forwarding "Islands in the Stream" Mary Hemingway indicated
   that she worked with Charles Scribner, Jr. on "preparing this book for
   publication from Ernest's original manuscript." In that note she stated
   that "beyond the routine chores of correcting spelling and punctuation,
   we made some cuts in the manuscript, I feeling that Ernest would surely
   have made them himself. The book is all Ernest's. We have added nothing
   to it." Some controversy has surrounded the publication of these works,
   insofar as it has been suggested that it is not necessarily within the
   jurisdiction of Hemingway's relatives or publishers to determine
   whether these works should be made available to the public. For
   example, scholars often disapprovingly note that the version of The
   Garden of Eden published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1986, though in
   no way a revision of Hemingway's original words, nonetheless omits
   two-thirds of the original manuscript.

   The Nick Adams Stories appeared posthumously in 1972. What is now
   considered the definitive compilation of all of Hemingway's short
   stories was published as The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest
   Hemingway, first compiled and published in 1987. As well, in 1969 The
   Fifth Column and Four Stories Of The Spanish Civil War was published.
   It contains Hemingway's only full length play, The Fifth Column, which
   was previously published along with the First Forty-Nine Stories in
   1938, along with four unpublished works written about Hemingway's
   experiences during the Spanish Civil War.

   In 1999, another novel entitled True at First Light appeared under the
   name of Ernest Hemingway, though it was heavily edited by his son
   Patrick Hemingway. Six years later, Under Kilimanjaro, a re-edited and
   considerably longer version of True at First Light appeared. In either
   edition, the novel is a fictional account of Hemingway's final African
   safari in 1953–1954. He spent several months in Kenya with his fourth
   wife, Mary, before his near-fatal plane crashes took place.
   Anticipation of the novel, whose manuscript was completed in 1956,
   adumbrates perhaps an unprecedentedly large critical battle over
   whether it is proper to publish the work (many sources mention that a
   new, light side of Hemingway will be seen as opposed to his canonical,
   macho image), even as editors Robert W. Lewis of University of North
   Dakota and Robert E. Fleming of University of New Mexico have pushed it
   through to publication; the novel was published on September 15 2005.

   Also published after Hemingway's death were several collections of his
   work as a journalist. These collections contain his columns and
   articles for Esquire Magazine, The North American Newspaper Alliance,
   and the Toronto Star; they include Byline: Ernest Hemingway edited by
   William White, and Hemingway: The Wild Years edited by Gene Z.
   Hanrahan. Finally, a collection of introductions, forwards, public
   letters and other miscellanea was published as Hemingway and the
   Mechanism of Fame in 2005.

Influence and legacy

   The influence of Hemingway's writings on American literature was
   considerable and continues today. Indeed, the influence of Hemingway's
   style was so widespread that it may be glimpsed in most contemporary
   fiction, as writers draw inspiration either from Hemingway himself or
   indirectly through writers who more consciously emulated Hemingway's
   style. In his own time, Hemingway affected writers within his modernist
   literary circle. James Joyce called "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" "one
   of the best stories ever written". Pulp fiction and " hard boiled"
   crime fiction (which flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s) often owed
   a strong debt to Hemingway. Hemingway's terse prose style--"Nick stood
   up. He was all right"-- is known to have inspired Bret Easton Ellis,
   Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and many Generation X writers.
   Hemingway's style also influenced Jack Kerouac and other Beat
   Generation writers. J.D. Salinger is said to have wanted to be a great
   American short story writer in the same vein as Hemingway. Hunter S.
   Thompson often compared himself to Hemingway, and terse Hemingway-esque
   sentences can be found in his early novel, The Rum Diary. Thompson's
   later suicide by gunshot to the head mirrored Hemingway's, although he
   used a .45 and not a shotgun. Hemingway also provided a role model to
   fellow author and hunter Robert Ruark, who is frequently referred to as
   "the poor man's Ernest Hemingway". In Latin American literature,
   Hemingway's impact can be seen in the work of fellow Nobel Prize winner
   Gabriel García Márquez, who often uses the sea as a central image in
   his fiction. Beyond the more formal literature authors, popular
   novelist Elmore Leonard, who authored scores of Western and Crime genre
   novels, cites Hemingway as his preeminent influence and this is evident
   in his tightly written prose. Though he never claimed to write serious
   literature, he did say, "I learned by imitating Hemingway....until I
   realized that I didn't share his attitude about life. I didn't take
   myself or anything as seriously as he did."

Awards and honours

   During his lifetime Hemingway was awarded with:
     * Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) in World War I
     * Bronze Star (War Correspondent-Military Irregular in World War II)
       in 1947
     * Pulitzer Prize in 1953 (for The Old Man and the Sea)
     * Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 (The Old Man and the Sea cited as
       a reason for the award)

Hemingway in fiction, art, and song

     * In 1999, Michael Palin retraced the footsteps of Hemingway, in
       Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure, a television documentary, one
       hundred years after the birth of his favorite writer. The journey
       took him through many sites including Chicago, Paris, Italy,
       Africa, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho. The book is available at his
       website.

     * Since 1987, actor-writer Ed Metzger has portrayed the life of
       Ernest Hemingway in his one-man stage show, Hemingway: On The Edge,
       featuring stories and anecdotes from Hemingway's own life and
       adventures. Metzger quotes Hemingway, "My father told me never kill
       anything you're not going to eat. At the age of 9, I shot a
       porcupine. It was the toughest lesson I ever had." More information
       about the show is available at his website

     * Hemingway's World War II experiences in Cuba have been novelized by
       Dan Simmons as a spy thriller, The Crook Factory.

     * Science fiction novelist Joe Haldeman won the Hugo Award and the
       Nebula Award for his novella, The Hemingway Hoax, a story which
       explored the effect that Hemingway's lost stories might have had
       upon twentieth century history.

     * In Harry Turtledove's Alternate History Timeline-191, Hemingway
       shows up as a character who drove ambulances on the US-Canadian
       Front in Quebec during the Great War. The character had part of his
       reproductive organs shot off in the war, giving him severe
       depression and suicidal tendencies.

     * In Dave Sim's graphic novel Cerebus, the story arc "Form and Void"
       features Ham and Mary Ernestway, parodies of Hemingway and his wife
       Mary. The last few years of Hemingway's life, including his
       electroshock therapy, the safari in which he was badly injured, and
       his suicide, are used as plot points for the story.

     * The 1988 film The Moderns locates itself in Hemingway's Paris with
       a central character named Nick Hart, who befriends Hemingway.

     * The famous heavy-metal band, Metallica were inspired by 'For Whom
       The Bell Tolls' and penned the eponymous song that went on to
       become a major hit.

     * The band Ween mentions Hemingway on the song "Don't Laugh I Love
       You". The lyrics read, "Ernest Hemingway would always be there for
       me. But now Ernest Hemingway is dead." Punk rock band Bad Religion
       references Hemingway in their song "Stranger Than Fiction". The
       lyric in point, "I want to know why Hemingway cracked."

     * Hemingway is mentioned in Billy Joel's history themed song " We
       Didn't Start the Fire", as the first figure in the 13th stanza.

     * It is somewhat believed that The Killers were named after his
       famous short story.

     * Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz, has mentioned Hemingway several times in
       his online blog, and even named his English Bulldog after him.

     * In the MMORPG World of Warcraft, there is a questgiver in
       Stranglethorn Vale called Hemet Nesingwary. His name is certainly
       the anagram of Hemingway's, and even their face is similar. Also,
       Nesingwary wrote a book called "Green Hills of Stranglethorn", a
       spoof on "Green Hills of Africa".

     * In Celebrity Deathmatch, Hemingway fights against Mankind ( Mick
       Foley).

     * Hemingway is mentioned along with Fitzgerald in the song "Poor
       Little Rich Boy", by Regina Spektor.

Trivia

     * Sailors were long-known to especially value polydactyl cats (which
       have extra toes as a genetic trait) for their extraordinary
       climbing and hunting abilities as an aid in controlling shipboard
       rodents. Some sailors also considered them to be extremely good
       luck when at sea. Hemingway was one of the more famous lovers of
       polydactyl cats. He was first given a six-toed cat by a ship's
       captain. As provided in his will, his former home in Key West,
       Florida (which is now a popular museum), currently houses
       approximately sixty descendants of his cats, approximately 50% of
       whom are polydactyl. The house and its feline residents make a
       brief appearance in the 1989 James Bond film Licence to Kill.

     * While Hemingway was married to Pauline Pfeiffer, he lived and wrote
       most of A Farewell to Arms and several short stories at her
       parents' house in Piggott, Arkansas. The Pfeiffer House has been
       converted into a museum and is now owned by Arkansas State
       University.

     * According to various biographical sources, Hemingway was six feet
       tall and weighed anywhere between 170 and 260 pounds at varying
       times in his life. His build was muscular, though he became paunchy
       in his middle years. He had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and
       habitually wore a mustache (with an occasional beard) from the age
       of 23 on. By age 50, he consistently wore a graying beard. He had a
       scar on his forehead, the result of a drunken accident in Paris in
       his late 20s (thinking he was flushing a toilet, he accidentally
       pulled a skylight down on his head). He suffered from myopia all
       his life, but vanity prevented him from being fitted with glasses
       until he was 32 (and very rarely was he photographed wearing them).
       He was fond of tennis, fonder of fishing and hunting, and hated New
       York City.

     * The late actress and model Margaux Hemingway and her actress sister
       Mariel Hemingway are Hemingway's granddaughters.

     * Jake Barnes, the impotent protagonist in The Sun Also Rises, is
       allegedly based on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

     * Hemingway's memorial is inscribed with a eulogy he wrote for a
       friend, Gene Van Guilder:

     Best of all he loved the fall
     The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
     Leaves floating on the trout streams
     And above the hills
     The high blue windless skies
     Now he will be a part of them forever
     Ernest Hemingway - Idaho - 1939

     * Hemingway is believed to have purchased the gun he used to commit
       suicide at Abercrombie & Fitch, which was then a firearm supplier.

     * Though Hemingway did not have a favorable opinion of his hometown
       of Oak Park, IL, describing it as a town of "Wide yards and narrow
       minds," the town has adopted a favorable opinion about him. Today a
       Hemingway Museum exists in that town. Every summer a Hemingway
       festival is staged in that city, complete with a "running of the
       bulls," using a fake bull on wheels. This festival also features
       readings of the author's work and Spanish food.

Works

Novels/novellas

          (1924) The Torrents of Spring
          (1926) The Sun Also Rises
          (1927) Fiesta (Fiesta is the Spanish title for The Sun Also
          Rises)
          (1929) A Farewell to Arms
          (1937) To Have and Have Not
          (1940) For Whom the Bell Tolls
          (1950) Across the River and Into the Trees
          (1952) The Old Man and the Sea
          (1970) Islands in the Stream
          (1986) The Garden of Eden
          (1999) True At First Light
          (2005) Under Kilimanjaro

Nonfiction

          (1932) Death in the Afternoon
          (1935) Green Hills of Africa
          (1962) Hemingway, The Wild Years
          (1964) A Moveable Feast
          (1967) By-Line: Ernest Hemingway
          (1970) Ernest Hemingway: Cub Reporter
          (1981) Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961
          (1985) The Dangerous Summer
          (1985) Dateline: Toronto

Short story collections

          (1923) Three Stories and Ten Poems
          (1925) Cat in the Rain
          (1925) In Our Time
          (1927) Men Without Women
          (1933) Winner Take Nothing
          (1936) The Snows of Kilimanjaro
          (1938) The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories
          (1969) The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil
          War
          (1972) The Nick Adams Stories
          (1987) The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
          (1995) Everyman's Library: The Collected Stories

Movies based on Hemingway's works

   US and UK releases only.

          (1932) A Farewell to Arms (starring Gary Cooper)
          (1943) For Whom the Bell Tolls (starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid
          Bergman)
          (1944) To Have and Have Not (starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren
          Bacall)
          (1946) The Killers (starring Burt Lancaster)
          (1952) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (starring Gregory Peck)
          (1957) A Farewell to Arms (starring Rock Hudson)
          (1957) The Sun Also Rises (starring Tyrone Power)
          (1958) The Old Man and the Sea (starring Spencer Tracy)
          (1962) Adventures of a Young Man
          (1964) The Killers (starring Lee Marvin)
          (1965) For Whom the Bell Tolls
          (1977) Islands in the Stream (starring George C. Scott)
          (1984) The Sun Also Rises
          (1990) The Old Man and the Sea (starring Anthony Quinn)
          (1996) In Love and War (starring Chris O'Donnnell)

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