Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago. His father was a physician and his mother a musician, and he was raised in a comfortable but emotionally complicated household. He excelled at English and journalism at Oak Park High School and, after a brief stint as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy during World War I. He was seriously wounded near Fossalta di Piave in 1918, an experience that gave him his most enduring subject — the wound, physical and psychic, that war inflicts on the young — and that initiated the difficult, restless, performance-driven life he would live for the next four decades. After the war he worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris for the Toronto Star, and the years in Paris — living among Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the broader community of Anglo-American modernists — were decisive for his literary development.
The Sun Also Rises (1926), his first novel, announced his voice and his subject with stunning authority. Drawn from his experiences among the expatriate American community in Paris and his attendance at the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, it follows Jake Barnes — narrator, journalist, veteran of the war, wounded in a way that has left him sexually incapacitated — and his circle of friends through a week of drinking, talking, watching bullfights, and circling the beautiful, destructive Lady Brett Ashley. The novel is the defining document of the Lost Generation — the phrase Stein gave him as its epigraph — and its portrait of post-war disillusionment, aimlessness, and the desperate search for meaning through sensation and stoicism remains one of the essential diagnoses of modern alienation.
A Farewell to Arms (1929), drawn from his own wartime experience and his love affair with a nurse, tells the story of an American ambulance officer and an English nurse whose romance plays out against the Italian campaigns of World War I. It is one of the great anti-war novels in American literature, combining a love story of real tenderness with a devastating portrait of the chaos, futility, and random cruelty of modern warfare. Its ending — one of the most famous in American fiction — achieves a bleakness that is all the more devastating for the restraint with which it is rendered. Together, these two novels established Hemingway as the most influential American prose stylist of the twentieth century.
Hemingway’s style — the short declarative sentence, the plain Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, the heavy use of “and” in place of subordinating conjunctions, the systematic suppression of authorial comment and emotional explanation — was not merely a technique but a philosophy: what he called the “iceberg theory,” the idea that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The weight of what is omitted, what is felt rather than stated, gives his best work its extraordinary emotional pressure. His influence on subsequent American prose — from Raymond Carver to Cormac McCarthy — has been pervasive and lasting.
Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, following the enormous success of The Old Man and the Sea (1952). His later decades were marked by alcoholism, physical injury, and mental deterioration, and he took his own life on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho. The posthumous publications, including A Moveable Feast (1964) and The Garden of Eden (1986), have added to a portrait of an enormously gifted, deeply troubled writer whose personal mythology both enhanced and ultimately obscured his literary achievement. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms remain among the indispensable American novels of the twentieth century.
