Author: Ernest Hemingway
Books: “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “Farewell to Arms”
Ernest Hemingway’s early life experiences, from hunting and fishing trips, to time spent during the Spanish Civil War and World War I, shaped his writing style and heavily influenced his literary works. Hemingway’s experiences in war provided him with the basis for two novels; For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. A trademark of Hemingway’s novels is his short, choppy writing style, which, with its calculated repetition allows readers to remember what has been said. Through his early life experiences as an ambulance driver and war reporter, Hemingway was able to understand the brutality of war and provide a basis for his novels.
On July 21, 1899, Ernest Hemingway was born in the town of Oak Park, Illinois, just South of Chicago. His father, Clarence, was a physician and his mot...
One observation that can be made on Hemingway’s narrative technique as shown in his short stories is his clipped, spare style, which aims to produce a sense of objectivity through highly selected details. Hemingway refuses to romanticize his characters. Being “tough” people, such as boxers, bullfighters, gangsters, and soldiers, they are depicted as leading a life more or less without thought. The world is full of s...
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway, was published in 1940. It is a novel set in the Spanish Civil War, which ravaged the country in the late 1930’s. Tensions in Spain began to rise as early as 1931,when a group of left-wing Republicans overthrew the country’s monarchy in a bloodless coup. The new Republican government then proposed controversial religious reforms that angered right-wing Fascists, who had the support of the army and the Catholic Church. Hemingway traveled extensively in Spain, and grew very interested in Spanish culture. Specifically, he writes about bullfighting, not only in this novel, but also in his other works as well. While Hemingway’s novels carry a common theme, For Whom the Bell Tolls is no different. In the form of suicide, inevitability of death, and sacrifice, death is the major theme that wraps around this story.
Stewart, Matthew C. "Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting Recent Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War." Papers on Language & Literature 36.2 (2000): 198-221.
A legendary novelist, short-story writer and essayist Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in the village of Oak Park, Illinois, close to the prairies and woods west of Chicago. His mother Grace Hall had an operatic career before marrying Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway. While growing up, the young Hemingway spent lots of his time hunting and fishing with his physician father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, and learned about the ways of music with his mother, who was a musician and artist. He was the second of Clarence and Grace Hemingway's six children. He was raised in a strict Protestant community that tried as hard as possible to be separate themselves from the big city of Chicago, though they were very close geographically. Both parents and their nearby families fostered the Victorian priorities of the time: religion, family, work and discipline. They followed the Victorians' elaborate sentimental style in living and writing. He attended school in the Oak Park Public School system and in high school, Hemingway played sports and wrote for the school newspaper. At Oak Park and River Forest High School, Ernest reported and wrote articles, poems and stories for the school's publications largely based on his direct experiences. Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. 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. In July, 1961, he ended his life in Ketchum, Idaho.
Ernest Hemingway was a great American author whom started his career humbly in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the ripe, young age of seventeen. Once the United States joined World War One, Hemingway deemed it fit to join a volunteer ambulance service. During this time Hemingway was wounded, and decorated by the Italian Government for his noble deeds. Once he completely recovered, he made his way back to the United States. Upon his arrival he became a reporter for the American and Canadian newspapers and was sent abroad to cover significant events. For example, he was sent to Europe to cover the Greek revolution. During his early adulthood, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris. This is known as the time in his life in which he describes in two of his novels; A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises the latter of the two being his first work. Hemingway was able to use his experiences of serving in the front during the war and his experience of being with other expatriates after the war to shape both of these novels. He was able to successful write these novels due to his past experience with working for newspapers. His experience with the newspaper seemed to be far more beneficial than just supplying him with an income, with the reporting experience under his belt he also was able to construct another novel that allowed him to sufficiently describe his experiences reporting during the Civil War; For Whom the Bell Tolls. Arguably his most tremendous short novel was a about an old fisherman’s journey and the long, lonely struggle with a fish and the sea with his victory being in defeat.
"After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain" (332). This last line of the novel gives an understanding of Ernest Hemingway's style and tone. The overall tone of the book is much different than that of The Sun Also Rises. The characters in the book are propelled by outside forces, in this case WWI, where the characters in The Sun Also Rises seemed to have no direction. Frederick's actions are determined by his position until he deserts the army. Floating down the river with barely a hold on a piece of wood his life, he abandons everything except Catherine and lets the river take him to a new life that becomes increasing difficult to understand. Nevertheless, Hemingway's style and tone make A Farewell to Arms one of the great American novels. Critics usually describe Hemingway's style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxer's punches--combinations of lefts and rights coming at us without pause. As illustrated on page 145 "She went down the hall. The porter carried the sack. He knew what was in it," one can see that Hemingway's style is to-the-point and easy to understand. The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway's and his characters' beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can't be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like "patriotism," so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete and the tangible. A simple "good" becomes higher praise than another writer's string of decorative adjectives. Hemingway's style changes, too, when it reflects his characters' changing states of mind. Writing from Frederic Henry's point of view, he sometimes uses a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, a method for spilling out on paper the inner thoughts of a character. Usually Henry's thoughts are choppy, staccato, but when he becomes drunk the language does too, as in the passage on page 13, "I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois on July, 21 1899 to his mother Grace Hall and his father Clarence Edmonds Hemingway (Rood 187). Even though he was born into a upper-middle class family, he single handedly revised the Byronic stereotype of the artist-adventurer (Lesniak 20). Hemingway’s childhood was rarely mentioned, other then that he tried to run away from
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, to Dr. Clarence and Grace Hemingway and the second oldest out of 6 children. Hemingway's childhood pursuits such as hunting and sports fostered the interests that would blossom into literary achievements. In 1918, during World War I, Hemingway served as a Red Cross volunteer in Italy, driving an ambulance and working at a canteen. "After working in Italy for six weeks, he was seriously wounded by a fragm...
The World War One novelist Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “There were many words you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene” (Hemingway, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, 1929). Hemingway knew the horrors of war. He was a veteran of World War One. This was a war where 65 million troops were mobilized, and 37 million were killed, wounded, or went missing. War was seen as glorious until these views were brought in. Hemingway became famous for his writing as a member of the ‘Lost Generation’ of American writers. He, along with writers such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot made up the great American writers of the time. However, they did have their European
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero, Illinois. Clarence and Grace Hemingway raised Ernest in the suburbs of Chicago and Northern Michigan. He spent most of his young years with his father, where he learned things that are necessary for a “man” to know. This included hunting, fishing, and appreciating the outdoors (“Early Years” 1). This being the origin of his notion that to be a man, you must follow masculine stereotypes.
In his novel A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway transfers his own emotional burdens of World War I to his characters. Although considered to be fiction, the plot and characters of Hemingway’s novel directly resembled his own life and experience, creating a parallel between the characters in the novel and his experiences. Hemingway used his characters to not only to express the dangers of war, but to cope and release tension from his traumatic experiences and express the contradictions within the human mind. Hemingway’s use of personal experiences in his novel represents Freud’s Psychoanalytic theory regarding Hemingway’s anxieties and the strength and dependency that his consciousness has over his unconsciousness.
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. He was a writer who started his career with a newspaper office in Kansas City when he was seventeen. When the United States got involved in the First World War, Hemingway joined with a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. During his service, he was wounded, and was decorated by the Italian Government. Upon his return to the United States, he was employed by Canadian and American newspapers as a reporter, and sent back to Europe to cover the Greek Revolution. In the 1920’s, Hemingway was a member of expatriate Americans in Paris. In one writing of Hemingway, it reads, “In the nearly sixty two years of his life that followed he forged a literary reputation unsurpassed in the twentieth century” (LostGeneration). During this time, he wrote some of his most important and successful works of literature. Ernest Hemingway is one of the most influential writers of his time. One biography of him said, “His novels and short fictions have left an indelible mark on the literary production of the United States and the world” (TheEuropeanGraduateSchool).
Ernest Hemingway used his experiences from World War I to enhance the plot of A Farewell to Arms. Parallels can be drawn throughout the entire novel between Henry's and Hemingway's experiences. Both were Americans serving in the Italian army; both were wounded and went to Milan; both fell in love with a nurse. These many similarities, however, also contain slight differences. There is no real question that Hemingway based events in the novel off of his real experiences, but A Farewell to Arms is by no means an autobiography. The book does not focus on the experience of war. Instead, it is more focused on the after-effects. Minor changes to the events themselves make the novel unique, while the factual basis strengthens the plot with authentic feeling.
There are indications in each of the novel’s five books that Ernest Hemingway meant A Farewell to Arms to be a testament against war. World War One was a cruel war with no winners; ”War is not won by victory” (47). Lieutenant Frederic Henry, the book’s hero and narrator, experiences the disillusionment, the hopelessness and the disaster of the war. But Henry also experiences a passionate love; a discrepancy that ironically further describes the meaninglessness and the frustration felt by the soldiers and the citizens.
...so provided the reader with realistic descriptions of the warfront. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms realistically explores the inglorious and brutal truths of war, and idealistically analyzes the power of true love.