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Earnest Hemingway

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Earnest Hemingway
As one of the 20th century's most important and influential writers. His writings drew heavily on his own experiences for his writing. His writing reflected his trouble with relating to women and his tendency to treat them as objects, as he had four marriages and countless affairs, highlighting his theme of alienation and disconnection. Now here is why he is what he is by writing about what he was.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, to Dr. Clarence Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway. Oak Park was a mainly Protestant, upper middle-class suburb of Chicago that Hemingway would later refer to as a “town of wide lawns and narrow minds" (Gerogiannis 188). The second among six children, Ernest spent the first two years of his life dressed as a girl by his mother. She called him “Ernestine” and fantasized that he was the twin of his older sister, as she dressed them both in matching dresses and gave them similar hairstyles (Rozkis 233) As he grew older, however, his father stepped in and insisted that Ernest be “raised like a man,” teaching Ernest how to behave and introducing him at a young age to hunting, fishing, and boxing, all activities in which he would stay interested for the rest of his life (Gerogiannis) It is perhaps this early start at questioning his manliness and his father’s attempts to drive any femininity out of him that instilled his characteristic obsession with proving his masculinity throughout his life.
Schlusemeyer 2
Hemingway received his schooling in the Oak Park public school system. In high school he was mediocre at sports, joining the football, swimming, basketball, and water polo teams and serving as the track team manager (Nelson 5). He began his journalistic career writing for the school paper, the Trapeze, where he wrote his first articles and often humorous pieces in the style of Ring Lardner, a popular satirist of the time. After graduating in the spring of 1917, against the wishes of his parents, he forwent college and took a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. It is here that the seeds of his unmistakable staccato writing style were planted as he followed the rules of the Star’s stylebook exactly. “Use short sentences,” it said. “Use shor...

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...Modified August, 1999. Viewed April 20, 2005. http://www.ernest.hemingway.com
Ernest Hemingway in Oak Park, Illinois Last Modified 2004. Viewed April 21, 2005. http://www.ehfop.org
Gerogiannis, Nicholas. "Ernest Hemingway." Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Authors in Paris. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 1982. 187-211.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Nelson, Raymond S. Ernest Hemingway: Life, Work, and Criticism. Fredericton, N.B., Canada: York Press, 1984.
Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time Last Modified January, 1998. Viewed April 21, 2005. http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/hemingway/index.htm
Rozkis, Laurie E. Macho, Macho Man: Ernest Hemingway. New York: Pearson Press, 1999.
The Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum Last Modified 2002. Viewed April 20, 2005. http://www.hemingwayhome.com
Timeless Hemingway. Last Modified January, 2005. Viewed April 20, 2005. http://www.timelesshemingway.com
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