Ernest Hemingway is praised as one of the greatest American writers of
the twentieth century. With an understated prose style, his fiction features a narrow range of characters and a harsh focus on violence and
machismo (an exaggerated sense of masculine toughness). Many critics
and readers have come to appreciate the depth of the author’s vision beneath his tough-guy restraint.
Early years
Born on July 21, 1899, Hemingway led a fairly happy, upper-middleclass childhood in Oak Park, Illinois. By his teens, he had become interested in literature, and he wrote a weekly column for his high school
newspaper and contributed poems and stories to the school magazine.
Upon graduation in 1917, Hemingway became a junior reporter for
the Kansas City Star, covering the police and hospital beats and writing
feature stories. He quickly demonstrated a talent for the kind of powerful, unbiased stories of violence and despair that later dominated his
fiction.
Drives ambulance in World War I
Hemingway tried to join the U.S. Army during World War I
(1914–18), but his poor eyesight prevented it. Instead, he volunteered as
an ambulance driver in Italy for the American Red Cross. He was badly
wounded in both legs by a shrapnel explosion on the Italian battlefront.
While he was recovering, he fell in love with an American nurse, who
abruptly left him. This experience later provided the basis of his novel A
Farewell to Arms (1929).
Back home after the war, Hemingway drafted stories drawn from his
boyhood years and wartime experiences that captured his awakening
sense of life’s misfortunes. He eventually returned to journalism to support himself, contributing features to the Toronto (Ontario) Star.
Expatriate in Paris
Following his first marriage (there were four in all) in 1921, Hemingway
moved to Paris, the literary capital of Europe in the 1920s. He traveled
frequently, covering the Greco-Turkish War of 1922 and writing specialinterest pieces for the Toronto paper. During this period, Hemingway
matured as a writer, greatly aided in his artistic development by his close
contact in Paris with prominent writers of the time, many who were also
expatriates, or people who live outside their own country. They included
American fiction writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), Irish fiction writer
James Joyce (1882–1941), and American fiction writer F. Scott
Fitzgerald (1896–1940).
In 1924, Hemingway published a series of eighteen sketches stemming from his war experiences combined with a group of short stories,
calling it In Our Time. The majority of the stories focus on Nick Adams,
the perfect example of a Hemingway hero. The early stories introduce
Nick as a vulnerable adolescent attempting to understand a violent and
confusing world. On the surface, Nick appears tough and insensitive.
Most critics believe that the toughness of the Hemingway hero masks a deep and sensitive knowledge of tragedy surrounding him. The short stories in the work are considered some of Hemingway’s finest efforts.
Two novels
Hemingway returned to the United States in 1926, the year his novel
The Sun Also Rises was published. The novel is about a group of
American and English expatriates in Paris, all of whom have suffered
physically and emotionally during World War I. The narrator is Jake
Barnes, who was badly wounded in the war. In his postwar life, he establishes his own code of behavior, no longer believing in the dictates of society. He engages in a doomed love affair with the alcoholic Lady Brett
Ashley. He is unable to have sexual relations because of his war wounds
and stands by as Brett Ashley goes through a series of lovers.
Upon its release, critics objected to The Sun Also Rises as a story of
meaningless drinking and sex. But a few critics immediately recognized
the novel as a literary work and praised its quest for meaning and values
that could endure even in a modern world in which traditional values
have lost their force.
In 1927, Hemingway moved to Key West, Florida, where he could
indulge his love of fishing and work on A Farewell to Arms. The story of
a love affair between an American soldier and an English nurse, the novel
expresses the Hemingway code of toughness and endurance in a violent
age. Following the novel’s immense success, Hemingway was recognized
as a major force in literature.
The tough guy
In the early 1930s, Hemingway contributed a series of articles to a new
magazine, Esquire. In these articles, intentionally or not, he projected an
image of himself as a man’s man—tough and foulmouthed, an outdoorsman and also a notorious playboy. True to that image, he took up fishing from his cabin cruiser Pilar in the wealthy playground of the
Bahamas. One product of this time was the novel To Have and Have Not
(1937), which dramatized his admiration for a Key West desperado
named Harry Morgan.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Hemingway
wanted to play a role in the fight against fascism (an authoritarian political system in which individual liberty is suppressed for the interests of the state). He sailed for Spain in 1937 under contract to the North
American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). His Spanish Civil War novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940. The novel portrays modern war in all its horror. It was the most commercially successful of
Hemingway’s books through 1940.
The 1940s and 1950s
After the start of World War II (1939–45), Hemingway again became
personally involved. He set up an organization to spy on German Nazi
agents who were gathering in Cuba. He even supervised the adaptation
of his beloved fishing boat, Pilar, to be used against German submarines
in the Caribbean. He spent part of the war in England and France and
took part in efforts to liberate France from German occupation.
In 1952, after a long unproductive period, Hemingway published
The Old Man and the Sea, a novella based on a true story he had heard
from a Cuban boatman. The tale of old Santiago and his battle with the
giant marlin was a kind of universal fable: one man alone, locked in a
struggle with a worthy adversary. Though the old man eventually lost his
prize to sharks, he had carried on against great odds with courage and endurance, the qualities that Hemingway most revered. The novella earned
Hemingway a Pulitzer Prize in 1953.
Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, but he had
been badly hurt in a plane accident and could not attend the ceremony.
Other physical ailments began to limit his creative energy. In the fall and
winter of 1957–58, Hemingway summoned energy to write a series of
sketches on his life in Paris from 1921 to 1926. Eventually named A
Moveable Feast (1964), it is considered the best work of his later life.
In 1960, Hemingway suffered a serious mental breakdown. His depressive behavior and other illnesses persisted, and he committed suicide
the following year.
Lasting reputation
During his lifetime, Hemingway actively promoted his larger-than-life
reputation as a tough American hero who sought to experience violence
as well as write about it. He was an expert in the arenas of war, bullfighting, deep-sea fishing, boxing, big-game hunting, and reckless, extravagant living—experiences that he often recounted in his fiction. Yet Hemingway viewed writing as his sacred occupation. He tried to be
painfully honest in his writing, seeking new truths while distancing himself from traditions that were no longer meaningful. His spare prose allows his readers to make their own judgments about the complex and jaded world he portrays.