About Ernest Hemingway

Ernestst Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in suburban Oak Park, IL, to Dr. Clarence and Grace Hemingway. Ernest was the second of six children. I am going to talk about his childhood pursuits and how they fostered the interests which would blossom into literary achievements.
Ernest Hemingway's mother Grace hoped that her son would follow in her footsteps and have an interest in music but it was just the opposite. Young Hemingway preferred to accompany his father on hunting and fishing trips. This love of outdoor adventure would be reflected later in many of Hemingway's stories.
Hemingway also had an aptitude for physical challenge that engaged him through high school, where he played football as well as boxed. Because of his numerous boxing matches he suffered permanent damage to his eye and because of this he was repeatedly rejected from services in WWI. Hemingway was later able to participate in WWI as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. He was wounded on July 8, 1918 on the Italian front. I found this Information on http://www.gradesaver.com/author/ernest-hemingway/
Upon returning to the U.S. Hemingway eventually married Hadley Richardson in 1912.
In 1927 Hemingway published a short story collection. In the same year he divorced Hadley and married Pauline Pfiffer , a writer for Vogue. In this year a Farwell to Arms was published, and his father committed suicide. When his parents recieved the first copies of their son's book In Our Time, they read it with horror. Furious, his father sent the volumes back to the publisher, as he could not tolerate such filth in the house.
In 1960, the now aged Hemingway moved to Ketchum, Idaho, where he was hospitalized for uncontrolled high blood pressure, liver disease, diabetes, and depression.
On July 2, 1961, he died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. He was buried in Ketchum, Idaho.

After Hemingway's suicide, stories surfaced that he had struck his wives and had beaten poet Wallace Stevens, a much smaller mam, over some minor literary quarrel. As told on http://www.americanlegends.com/authors/index.html

Hemingway's Notable Works

Ernest Hemingway's writing is well known by many people, and even though, everyone may not be an avid reader, chances are that everyone has heard of Hemingway’s 1940, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Not only is this story considered to be a one of Hemingway's best lyrical and dramatic non-poetry writing, even more so than his earlier works, but it is also his “…most ambitious novel”. This narrative is described as wonderful and clear.

According to Ernest Hemingway His Life and Works, his 1929, "A Farwell to Arms" closely relates to his own personal experience as an Italian Ambulance driver in the war. In fact, "Ernest Hemingway His Life and Works" says that, "Hemingway himself, claimed the account of Henry's wounding in this book was the most accurate version of his own wounding he had ever written." His woundings included a knee injury and shell fragments in his legs and body while serving in the Red Cross medical service, and then the Italian Army. Because he had been denied for active service in the U.S. infantry (due to eye problems), was the reason Hemingway chose to serve in the Italian Army. This experience gave Hemingway a backdrop to “A Farewell to Arms”.

After Hemingway's suicide, many of Hemingway's unpublished, as well as, unfinished works were published. Because of the Nobel Prize winning author’s accomplished writings, his approach to life, and along with Hemingway’s influential, twentieth-century writing style and emotional content has made him a well celebrated literary stylist.

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated." -Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway was unique.

Ernest Hemingway was unique in that he was one of the most famous American novelists, whose matter-of-fact style of writing has influenced a wide range of writers. Hemingway used his real life experience to write most of his wonderful stories, and he was also termed by colleges as, the most significant of living poets. I think his significance came from the reality he wrote about in his stories, and how true and real the stories were to his readers.

Ernest's characters in his books were as interesting as his own life. He took his real-life experiences, and added to them in his stories. Hemingway was unique, because he wrote from his own life experiences. He was a literary idol in the 30's and 40's, and a role model for young writers.

Hemingway's Criticism

Ernest Hemingway has a direct, yet subtle style of writing. He is sometimes called an international writer because he always went into different cultures and never stuck with one national identity. Being characterized as a American writer is sometimes a problem because in some of his writings, Hemingway put his narrators as American Men, but the protagonists are from a foreign country. Then his settings were normally set in foreign countries as well. His way of writing fiction is never blunt, yet direct. Many critics have classified Hemingway’s writings as “hard boiled”, a term that was originated from WWI training camps, but later the usage was used for literature. “Hard Boiled” style means that unfeeling, unemotional, rough, or coldhearted. Hemingway’s style was constantly viewed as concrete, direct, and short, that was a way his stories were always instantly identifiable with him. Hemingway had an awareness of the truth of facts and events which lead to proper feeling of emotion.