Ernest Hemingway was a man’s man whose tragic existence produced some of literature’s greatest works. He influenced writers around the world. Hemingway lived a boisterous and passionate life. Many of his novels reflect his hard-living life.
Born on July 21, 1899, Ernest Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois with two talented parents, Clarence and Grace Hemingway. Hemingway was extremely close to his father while growing up and developed his lifelong love of action and adventure from the many camping and hunting trips he took with his father. It is believed that he also inherited a genetic predisposition to manic depression from his father. Hemingway was married four times and had three sons.
He was the editor of his high school newspaper and later became a reporter for the Kansas City Star. It was during his time spent as a reporter that he refined his style of writing which was to “use short sentences, write with action words, and to never use an adjective when a vivid verb will relay the event” (Bloom 11). Hemingway eventually volunteered to be an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross where he was injured and fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse. This experience provided him with material for his novel A Farewell to Arms. After the war, Hemingway established himself as a writer, however “it was not until the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926 that he received the critical and popular acclaim he enjoyed through most of his career” (Bloom 12). In 1953, Hemingway earned a Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea. However, “his greatest triumph awaited him in 1954, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for The Old Man and the Sea, which the awards committee lauded for its powerful style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration” (Bloom 13).
Hemingway “was perhaps the most influential writer of his generation and scores of writers, particularly the hard-boiled writers of the thirties, attempted to adapt his tough, understated prose to their own works, usually without success” (Contemporary). “Apart from his style and his emphasis on the concrete detail, perhaps Hemingway’s most noteworthy contribution to literature is his theory of omission, which he practiced even in his earliest work” (Tyler 22). Hemingway’s hard-living eventually caught up to him. Papa Hemingway, as he was known by his friends, suffered from high blood pressure and depression. Sadly, “on the night of July 2, 1961, he could stand his weariness and weakness no longer and killed himself with a double-barreled shotgun” (Bloom 13). In his book Hemingway: Life Into Art, Jeffrey Meyers sums up the man best when he states, “Hemingway was not always an attractive man, but his faults were an essential part of his character and he would be a far less interesting and exciting writer if he had been, for example, as perfectly polite as Archibald MacLeish” (Meyers 167). Hemingway’s life is reflected in his many writings and his influence on other artists is still going strong. Kenny Chesney’s most recent album is named “Hemingway’s Whiskey” and Brad Paisley’s song “Alcohol” includes a reference about Hemingway’s use of alcohol.
Works Cited:
Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Major Short Story Writers Ernest Hemingway. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2005. Gale, 2010.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway Life Into Art. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.
Tyler, Lisa. Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001.
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