Ernest Hemingway is today known as one of the most influential American authors of the 20th century. This man, with immense repute in the worlds of not only literature, but also in sportsmanship, has cast a shadow of control and impact over the works and lifestyles of enumerable modern authors and journalists. To deny his clear mastery over the English language would be a malign comparable to that of discrediting Orwell or Faulkner. The influence of the enigma that is Ernest Hemingway will continue to be shown in works emulating his punctual, blunt writing style for years to come. Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois on July 21st, 1899 to his parents, Clarence and Grace Hemingway. His family was wealthy, and would eventually move to a much bigger house with a music studio and a medical office to accommodate their occupational needs. His relationship with his mother was rocky at best, and he complained of her persistence in making him play the cello. In a book written by his sister, she reported that Grace had been obsessed with having twin girls, and had gone as far to dress young Ernest in girl’s clothing and call him “Ernestine”. This went on until he was six years old, and may explain his continuous focus on appearing masculine later in life. His relationship with his mother would set the tone for his future interactions women. He was brought up a man’s man, his father teaching him to hunt, camp, and fish from the very young age of four years old. These summer retreats would take place at his family’s summer home on Lake Walloon in Michigan. Spending much of his time outdoors as a boy instilled in him a great affinity for nature and sporting. At Oak Park and River Forest High School, he was very involved in sports and did w... ... middle of paper ... ... an Italian officer. They would never meet again. This made Hemingway very insecure, and would be detrimental to the way he would handle relationships in the future. He would go on to develop a habit of abandonment of his wives. In September of 1919, after returning to his home and readjusting to his old life, he went on a fishing and camping trip with friends to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The trip inspired the short story, Big Two-Hearted River, in which his somewhat biographical character, Nick Adams made a return to his favorite fishing grounds after coming home from the war. Nick found that the area had been through some sort of fire, and the scorched trees and blackened insects represented Hemingway’s feelings that nothing was the same. A place which had once been so familiar and positive in his eyes was transmogriphied into a province of melancholy and woe.
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...
Looking at Ernest Hemingway's past, you'd see that he lived a very tough, strict childhood. He was raised under the thoughts that if you had strong religion, hard work, physical fitness, and self determination you would be very successful no matter what field you were to go into. This made his relationship with his parents sort of complex. It was more of a difficult relationship with his mother. She was demanding, and was also known to be over bearing. She didn't accept Ernest as being a boy, so she frequently would treat him as a female baby doll and dress him as one as well. He didn't have the 'ideal' childhood as normally wanted. I believe his mother not fostering that proper bond she should have made with him caused him to be unsure of himself. This could possibly be a cause to his depression. An example of the mental torture he was put through with his mother was on his birthday. For his birthday, after he was moved out, his mother sent him a 'present.' She mailed him a cake, the gun that his father had used to kill himself, along with a letter. The letter explained that a mothers life was like a bank. 'Every child that is born... enters the world with a large and prosperous bank account, seemingly inexhaustible.' She continued in the letter that he should replenish what he has withdrawn, and wrote out all the specific ways in which Ernest should be making 'deposits to keep the account in good standing.' His mother could be perceived as androgynous, which means having both female and male type qualities or even personalities. In a few of the books Hemingway wrote, he gives someone the impression that he hated his mother. He referred to her as a 'dominating shrew,' meaning she was selfish and only thought of herself. His mother considered herself pure and proper, and became very upset when anything 'disturbed' her view of the world as beautiful. Anything painful, or disgusting, she thought was not lady like. His childhood was very difficult and it stuck with him through-out his adult hood. Ernest never forgave his mother for humiliating him in front of the town.
Earnest Hemingway is one of Americas foremost authors. His many works, their style, themes and parallels to his actual life have been the focus of millions of people as his writing style set him apart from all other authors. Many conclusions and parallels can be derived from Earnest Hemingway's works. In the three stories I review, ?Hills Like White Elephants?, ?Indian Camp? and ?A Clean, Well-lighted Place? we will be covering how Hemingway uses foreigners, the service industry and females as the backbones of these stories. These techniques play such a critical role in the following stories that Hemingway would be unable to move the plot or character development forward without them.
Ernest Hemingway was an immensely skilled writer that left his everlasting mark on the writing community. He is an inspiration to young and old writers everywhere. Hemingway was taken away from the world too soon (at the age of 61) when he was killed by “self-inflicted gun wounds.” It is still unclear today whether it was suicide or accidental while cleaning his favorite shotgun. It is also unclear what stories Hemingway still had to offer the world and what writing would be like today if he released a couple more novels and short stories to the public. One things for certain, Hemingway had a way with words that turned ordinary things, like leopards or goats or elephants, into things unimaginable that can only be experience while reading his works.
His style was described as “an attempt to get at minds and souls and what goes on within.” Also as “oblique, inferential, suggestive rather than overt, explicit, explanatory.” And yet somehow, “Mr. Hemingway can pack a whole character into a phrase, an entire situation into a sentence or two.”
Hemingway joined the Italian Red Cross as an ambulance driver during WWI. During his time in Italy he was injured by a trench mortar shell and for quite a while would elaborate the story to make it more glorious and him more heroic than he actually was, the only thing known for sure was that he went to a hospital in Milan and fell in love with a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. “Scholars are divided over Agnes's role in Hemingway's life and writing, but there is little doubt that his relationship with her informed the relationship between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.” http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/farewell)
Growing up in a rich atmosphere of culture, religion, and the sciences, Ernest Hemingway was always surrounded by different perspectives and thoughts of the world around him. There was a restlessness in him that wanted to discover and explore new things. Beginning as early as high school, his inner-writer began to emerge and his stories were often read aloud to the class as examples of what the other students should strive for. These stories are rarely spoken of nowadays, but display his early talent. While the majority of people are mostly familiar with Hemingway’s well-known works in his later years, some of his earliest pieces that he contributed to the world are often forgotten. (Reef 53).
As one looks at Ernest Hemingway’s career and life, one is truly able to see how interesting his life was simply by reading his books. This lavish lifestyle attributed to his writing style, and this culmination ultimately led him to become a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not only did his great ability to translate his life experiences to works of literature help him win this award, but also his ability to use his art of symbolism and to appeal to readers of all ages and education.
Hemingway was a man born to change how literature is looked at today. He introduced and showed the world that using simplicity in writing can make the same effect as using descriptive language. I believe that Hemingway is a very creative man and used his technique in different ways, but sometimes authors need to be specific so that the reader can really live in the moment and understand everything from the the character’s thoughts and feelings, to the setting of the story. Sadly, he committed suicide on July 2, 1961 at the age of 61, in Ketchum, Idaho. Even though Ernest Hemingway left this world years ago, his legacy still lives here with us.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in a small community of Oak Park, Illinois. He was the second child out of six, with four sisters and one brother. The area Ernest grew up in was a very conservative area of Illinois and was raised with values of strong religion, hard work, physical fitness and self-determination. His household was a very strict one that didn’t allow any enjoyment on Sundays and disobedience was strictly punished. Ernest’s father taught him good morals and values that he if he followed that he would be good in life. His father also taught him to hunt and fish around the Lake Michigan area and to love nature. The family would spend their summers in the wilderness and their winters back near Chicago. For the rest of his life Hemingway remained an avid fisherman and never lived far form a fishing hole. The outdoors is where he created a lot of his work, and a place where he got a lot of his inspiration from.
Mandel, Miriam B.; Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the Fictions; The Scarecrow Press, Inc.; Metuchen, NJ; 1995
Earnest Hemingway’s work gives a glimpse of how people deal with their problems in society. He conveys his own characteristics through his simple and “iceberg” writing style, his male characters’ constant urge to prove their masculinity.
In the story Indian Camp the main character Nick and his father resemble the relationship between Hemingway and his father. Nick is a teenage boy that travels across the lake to an Indian Village. He watches his father, who is a doctor; deliver a baby by caesarian section to an Indian woman. Nicks father discovers that the baby’s father has committed suicide. Nick and his father have a conversation discussing death, which brings the story to an end. Hemingway grew up in a middle class suburb, where his parents Ed and Grace raised him. Ed was a doctor who took his son along on visits across Walloon Lake to the Ojibway Indians (Waldhorn 7).
“Then some one hit the drunkard a great blow alongside the head with a flail and he fell back, and lying on the ground, he looked up at the man who had hit him and then shut his eyes and crossed his hands on his chest, and lay there beside Don Anastasio as though he were asleep. The man did not hit him again and he lay there and he was still there when they picked up Don Anastasio and put him with the others in the cart that hauled them all over to the cliff where they were thrown over that evening with the others after there had been a cleaning up in the Ayuntamiento.” (Hemingway 126).
As a boy he was taught by his father to hunt and fish along the shores and in the forests surrounding Lake Michigan. The Hemingways had a summer house called Windemere on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, and the family would spend the summer months there trying to stay cool. Hemingway would either fish the different streams that ran into the lake, or would take the row boat out to do some fishing there. He would also go squirrel hunting in the woods near the summer house, discovering early in life the serenity to be found while alone in the forest or wading a stream. It was something he could always go back to throughout his life, wherever he was. Nature would be the touchstone of Hemingway's life and work, and though he often found himself living in major cities like Chicago, Toronto and Paris early in his career, once he became successful he chose somewhat isolated places to live like Key West, or San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, or Ketchum, Idaho. All were convenient places for hunting and fishing.