Ernest (Miller) Hemingway (1898-1961)

One of the most famous American novelist, short-story writer and essayist, whose deceptively simple prose style have influenced wide range of writers. Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was unable to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm because he was recuperating from injuries sustained in an airplane crash while hunting in Uganda.

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat as the taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue." (from 'On the Blue Water' in Esquire, April 1936)

Ernest Hemingway was born inn Oak Park, Illinois. His mother Grace Hall had a operatic career before marrying Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, who took his own life in 1928. Hemingway attended the public schools in Oak Park and published his earliest stories and poems in his high school newspaper. Upon his graduation in 1917 Hemingway worked six months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star and joined then volunteer ambulance unit in Italy during World War I. In 1918 he suffered a severe leg wound and was twice decorated by the Italian government. His affair with an American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, gave basis for the novel A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1929). The tragic love story was filmed first time in 1932, starring Gary Cooper, Helen Hayes, and Adolphe Menjou. In the second version from 1957, written by Ben Hecht and directed by Charles Vidor, Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones were in the leading roles. Its failure caused David O. Selznick to produce no more films.

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,then whenever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." (from A Moveable Feast, 1964)

After the war Hemingway worked for a short time as a journalist in Chicago. He moved in 1921 to Paris, wrote articles for the Toronto Star, and associated with such writers as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who edited some of his texts and acted as his agent. Later Hemingway portrayed Fitzgerald in A MOVEABLE FEAST (1964), but not in a friendly light. Fitzgerald, however, regretted their lost friendship. Of Gertrude Stein Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins, his editor: "She lost all sense of taste when she had the menopause. Was really an extraordinary business. Suddenly she couldn't tell a good picture from a bad one, a good writer from a bad one, it all went phtt." (from The Only Thing That Counts, 1996) When he was not writing for the newspaper or for himself, Hemingway toured with his wife, the former Elisabeth Hadley Richardson, France, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1922 he went to Greece and Turkey to report on the war between those countries. In 1923 Hemingway made two trips to Spain, on the second to see bullfights at Pamplona's annual festival.

Hemingway's first books, THREE STORIES AND TEN POEMS (1923) and IN OUR TIME (1924), were published in Paris. THE TORRENTS OF SPRING appeared in 1926 and Hemingway's first serious novel, THE SUN ALSO RISES, on the same year. After the publication of MEN WITHOUT WOMEN (1927) Hemingway returned to the United States, settling in Key West, Florida. Hemingway and Hadley divorced in 1927 and on the same year he married Pauline Pfeiffer, a fashion editor. In Florida he wrote A Farewell to Arms, which was published in 1929. Describing the collapse of the Italian front in World War I and two lovers' brief refuge in private happiness, the novel gained enormous critical and commercial success.

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." (from Green Hills of Africa, 1935)

In 1930s Hemingway wrote such major works as DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON (1932), a nonfiction account of Spanish bullfighting, THE GREEN HILL OF AFRICA (1935), a story of a hunting safari in East Africa, and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1937), which was made into a film by the director Howard Hawks. They had became friends in the late 1930s. Hawks also liked to hund, fish, and drink, and the author got along with Hawk's wife Slim, who later said: "There was an immdiate and instant attraction between us, unstated but very, very strong." According to a story, Hawks had told Hemingway that he can make "a movie out of the worst thing you ever wrote." The author has asked, "What's the worst thing I ever wrote?" and Haws said, "That piece of junk called To Have and Have Not." "I needed the money," Hemingway said. The screenplay of the film was written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner."And then it just occurred to him that he was going to die. It came with a rush, not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden evil-smelling emptiness, and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it." (from 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro')

Wallace Stevens once termed Hemingway "the most significant of living poets, so far as the subject of extraordinary reality is concerned." By 'poet' Stevens referred to Hemingway's stylistic achievements in the short story. Among his most famous stories is 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,' which begins with an epitaph telling that the western summit of the mountain is called the House of God, and close to it was found the carcass of a leopard. Down on the savanna the failed writer Harry is dying of gangrene in an hunting camp. "He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wrote it all out." Just before the end of the story Harry has a vision. He dreams that he is taken up the see the top of Kilimanjaro on a rescue plane -"great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun."

In 1937 Hemingway observed the Spanish Civil war firsthand. As many writers, he supported the cause of the Loyalist. He met in Madrid Martha Gellhorn (see further below), a war correspondent, with whom he had a romance, and who became his third wife. In TO WHOM THE BELLS TOLL (1940) returned again in Spain. The story depicted Spanish guerrillas and their American volunteer Robert Jordan. The story covered only a few days and concerned the blowing up of a brodge by a small group of partisans. When the heroine in A Farewell to Arms dies at the end of the story after giving birth to a stillborn child, now it is time for the hero to sacricife his life for comradeship and love. The theme of the coming of death ALSO was central in the novel ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES (1950).

In addition to hunting expeditions in Africa and Wyoming, Hemingway developed a passion for deep-sea fishing in the waters off Key West, the Bahamas, and Cuba. In 1940 Hemingway bought Finca Vigia, a house outside Havana, Cuba. He armed his fishing boat, the Pilar, and formed an intelligence network to monitor Nazi activities and their U-boats in that area. In early 1941 he and Martha Gelhorn reported on the Japanese involvement in China. When his marriage ended, Hemingway followed in 1944 the allied campaigns in Europe, taking part in the D-Day landings. Against expectations, Hemingway did not keep strictly in his role as an observer. He returned to Cuba in 1946, married Mary Welsh, a correspondent for Time magazine, whom he had met in a London restaurant in 1944.

Hemingway's drinking had started already when he was a reporter. He tolerate large amounts of alcohol and it did not affect the quality of his writing for a long time. In the late 1940s he started to hear voices in his head. He was overweight and the blood pressure was high. His ignorance of the dangers of liquor Hemingway revealed when he taught his son Patrick to drink, when he was only 12-years old. The same happened with his brothers. Whatever Hemingway tried to prove or teach failed, because Patrick had later in life problems with alcohol. Gregory used drugs and ended in prison. After weeks of heavy drinking in Spain, Hemingway went to a doctor, who noted that the author already had clear signs of cirrhosis of the liver.

Across the River and Into the Trees was Hemingway's first novel in a decade and poorly received. THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, published first in Life magazine in 1952, restored again his fame. It told a story of an Old Cuban fisherman named Santiago who finally catches a giant marlin after weeks of not catching anything. As he returns to the harbor, the sharks eat the fish, lashed to his boat. Living according to his public image as tough outdoor man and big-game hunter, Hemingway made a fishing trip to Peru in part to shoot footage for a film version of the Old Man and the Sea. He visited Spain and gathered material for another book of bullfighting and wrote A Moveable Feast, a memoir of the 1920s in Paris.

Much of his time Hemingway spent in Cuba until Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. He supported Castro but when the living became too difficult he moved to the United States. When visiting Africa in 1954 Hemingway was in two flying accidents and was taken to a hospital. In the same year he started to write TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT, which was his last full-length book. Part of it appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1972 under the title African Journal.In 1960 Hemingway was hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for treatment of depression, and released in 1961. During this time he was given electric shock therapy for two months. On July 2 Hemingway committed suicide with his favorite shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. Several of Hemingway's novels have been published posthumously. True at First Light, depiction of a safari in Kenya, appeared in July 1999. Its staggering language and self-pity reveal mostly the downfall of his famous style.

For further reading: Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by C. Baker (1969); My Brother, Ernest Hemingway by L. Hemingway (1962); Papa: Hemingway in Key West by J. McLendon (1972, rev. ed. 1990); Hemingway, Life and Works by G.B. Nelson and G. Jones (1985); Hemingway by Kenneth Lynn (1987); The Hemingway Women by B. Kert (1983); Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises by F.J. Svoboda (1983); Ernest Hemingway by K. Ferrell (1984); Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, ed. by H. Bloom (1987); Ernest Hemingway Rediscovered by N. Fuentes (1988); A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. by P. Smith (1989); Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction by J.M. Flora (1989); Ernest Hemingway by P.L. Hays (1990); Hemingway and Spain by E.F. Stanton (1990); Hemingway's Art of Nonfiction by R. Weber (1990); Ernest Hemingway by R.B. Lyttle (1992); Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences by James R. Mellow (1993); Hemingway: The 1930s by Michael Reynolds (1997); Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship by Scott Donaldson (1999) - NOTE: Ava Gardner played in three Hemingway films: The Killers, The Snows of Kilimanjaro,The Sun Also Rises she became friend of the writer and aficionada of bullfighting - SEE ALSO: Sherwood Anderson - WRITERS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR: Federico Garcia Lorca, George Orwell, André Malraux, Langston Hughes

Summary: The Sun Also Rises (1926) In England it's title in Fiesta. The novel deals with a group of expatriates in France and Spain, members of the disillusioned post-World War I Lost Generation. Main characters are Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes, survivor who is portrayed in stark contrast to his burned-out friends. Lady Brett loves Jake, who has been wounded in war and can't answer her needs. Although Hemingway never explicitly detailed Jake's injury, is seem that he has lost his testicles but not his penis. Jake and Brett and and their odd group of friends have various saddening adventures around Europe, in Madrid, Paris and Pampalona. In attempt to cope with their despair they turn to alcohol, violence, and irresponsible sex. The story is narrated in first person. As Jake, Hemingway was wounded in WW I. They share also interest in bullfighting. The story ends bitter-sweet: "Oh, Jake, Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together." Hemingway wrote and rewrote the novel in various parts of Spain and France between 1924 and 1926. It became his first great success as a novelist. Although the novel's language is simple, Hemingway used understatement and omission to show how the old beliefs that sustained pre-World War I Americans have been destroyed. In 1957 the story was adapted into screen. The film was directed by Henry King, starring Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner. - Films (see also below): Among Hemingway's several film adaptations are also The Macomber Affair (dir. by Zoltan Korda, 1946), The Breaking Point (dir. by Michael Curtiz, 1950), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (dir. by Henry King, 1952), Ernest Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (dir. by Martin Ritt, 1962), The Killers (dir. by Don Siegel, 1964).MARTHA GELLHORN (1908-1998) - Ernest Heminway's third wife was journalist, short story writer and novelist Martha Gellhorn. - Gellhorn was born in St. Louis as a daughter of a physician. She studied at Bryn Mawrin College and started he writing career as a journalist at The New Republic. In the 1930s Gellhorn traveled around the United States and wrote articles depicting effects of Depression Years on peoples' everyday life. In 1937 she went to Spain to write to Collier's Weekly about the Spanish Civil War. On this journey Gellhorn met Hemingway, but after their four year marriage she left him in 1945, which Hemingway never forgave. - During WW II Gellhorn witnessed the start of the Finnish Winter War in Helsinki in 1939. She wrote about the bombings of London and participated on D-Day landings in 1944 as a stretcher-bearer and was among the first to meet survivors from Dachau's concentration camp. Her war articles were published in 1955 under the title The Face of War. - Gellhorn continued as war correspondent to the age of 80. In 1953 she married journalist Thomas Matthews, who worked for Time. They separated in the 1960s. Gellhorn died in her home in London. Her books The View from the Ground and The Face of War were reprinted in 1998. - After their separation Gellhorn accused Hemingway of being a liar and jealous writer, who also was a bad lover. - For further information: Martha Gellhorn - For further reading: Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn by Carl Rollyson (2001)