Ernest Hemingway Biography and List of Works

One of the most famous American novelists, 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)

Hemingway was born inn Oak Park, Illinois. His mother Grace Hall had an 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 later basis for the novel A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1929).

"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. 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 Pampalona'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 non-fiction account of Spanish bullfighting, THE GREEN HILL OF AFRICA (1935), a story of a hunting safari in East Africa, and TO HAVE AND TO HAVE NOT (1937), which was made into film by Howard Hawks. 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 1937 Hemingway observed the Spanish Civil war firsthand, supporting the cause of the Loyalist, and met in Madrid Martha Gellhorn (see further below), a war correspondent, with whom Hemingway had a romance, and who became his third wife. TO WHOM THE BELLS TOLL (1940) was the author's impassioned and exiting novel about Spanish guerrillas and their American volunteer Robert Jordan.

In 1940 Hemingway bought Finca Vigia, a house outside Havana, Cuba and armed his fishing boat Pilar, forming an intelligence network to monitor Nazi activities 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 allied campaigns in Europe, taking part in the D-Day landings. He returned to Cuba in 1946, married Mary Welsh, a correspondent for Time magazine.

Hemingway's later works in the 1950s include ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES (1950), and THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, published first in Life magazine in 1952. 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 harbour, 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 (1964), 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 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 hospitalised 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 by shooting himself at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. Several of Hemingway's novels have been published posthumously. True at First Light, depiction of an African safari, appeared in July 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 - WRITERS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR: Federico Garcia Lorca, George Orwell, André Malraux, Langston Hughes.

Summary: The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises appeared in 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. They 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.

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)

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 travelled 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.

THREE STORIES AND THREE POEMS, (1923)