Ernest Hemingway: A Life of Adventure and Literature

Ernest Hemingway: One of the most famous American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, whose deceptively simple prose style have influenced a wide range of writers.

Ernest Hemingway: Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, 10 miles from Chicago. Ernest was the second of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and Grace Hall’s six children.

Hemingway’s Life and Times: A Cultural Biography

Both his grandfathers had fought in the American Civil War, although Grace’s father was born in Sheffield. His mother was a music teacher and his father, a doctor.

Hemingway was enthusiastic about his work but, after seven months, he volunteered as a Red Cross driver and sailed for Europe in 1918.

His affair with an American nurse, Agnes Von Kurowsky, gave a basis for the novel, A farewell to arms (1929). The tragic love story and study of an American ambulance officer’s disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter was filmed first time in 1932, starring Gary Cooper, Helen Hayes, and Adolphe Menjou.

After World War I, Hemingway worked for a short time as a journalist in Chicago. He moved in 1921 to Paris, where he married the first of his four wives, Hadley Richardson.

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.

 He divorced his wife in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer who was a Catholic, so he converted into a Catholic. They moved to Key West in Florida in 1928, the same year that his father, tormented by illness and financial problems, committed suicide.

The novel Farewell to Arms was published in 1929. During the Second World War, he was a war correspondent for seven months. In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Because of his strong action plots and spare, visually exact prose, many screen adaptations of his work have been made, including A Farewell to Arms (1933); To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Old Man and the Sea (1958).

Hemingway disliked almost all of the films of his books and was only involved with the production of the Old Man and the Sea. Across the River and Into the Trees was Hemingway’s first novel in a decade and poorly received.

Ernest Hemingway Life History

The Old Man and the Sea, distributed first in Life magazine in 1952, re-established again his acclaim. It recounted to an account of an old Cuban angler named Santiago who at long last gets a mammoth marlin following quite a while of not getting anything.

The model for Santiago was a Cuban angler, Gregorio Fuentes, who kicked the bucket in January 2002, at 104 years old. Fuentes had filled in as the skipper of Hemingway’s vessel, Pilar in the late 1930s and was every so often his tapster.

Hemingway – himself an incredible sportsman – jumped at the chance to depict fighters, seekers, matadors – extreme, now and again crude individuals whose mental fortitude and trustworthiness are set against the ruthless methods for the current society, and who in this encounter lose expectation and confidence.

His direct composition, his extra discourse, and his inclination for the modest representation of the truth are especially successful in his short stories, some of which are gathered in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and The First Forty-Nine Stories (1938).

During 1960–61, he disintegrated physically. Hemingway had high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney and liver disease. The drugs he was put on had the side effects of making him depressed. He was taken into the Mayo Clinic where he was treated with electric shock treatment that exacerbated his mental illness.

On release from hospital on July 2, 1961, he committed suicide by shooting himself with his favorite shotgun in the head one morning in the hallway of his home in Ketchum, Idaho.

Several of Hemingway’s novels have been published posthumously. True at First Light, a depiction of a safari in Kenya, appeared in July 1999. Its staggering language and self-pity reveal mostly the downfall of his famous style.