Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899, Oak Park, Illinois, USA – July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho) was an American writer, journalist, and war correspondent.
His style of writing, characterized by economy and understatement, influenced the novel of the 20th century, as did his adventurous life and the public image he maintained. He wrote most of his works between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, and his career peaked in 1954 when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His novels met with great success with the public because of the veracity with which he portrayed his characters. Several of his works were elevated to the rank of classics of American literature. He published seven novels, six collections of short stories and two non-fiction works during his lifetime. Three novels, four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works have been published posthumously.
Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, a town on the western outskirts of Chicago, Illinois. After leaving high school, he worked for a few months as a journalist, before leaving for the Italian front and becoming an ambulance driver during the First World War, which served as the basis for his novel Farewell to Arms. He was seriously injured and then spent more than three months in hospital. When he left, he enlisted in the Italian army. In 1922 Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives, and the couple moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent. During this period he encountered and was influenced by 1920s modernist writers and artists from the expatriate community known as the Lost Generation. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was written in 1926.
After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced after Hemingway's return from Spain, where he had covered the Spanish Civil War, which enabled him to write For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940, but he left her for Mary Welsh Hemingway after World War II, during which time he was present on the day of the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.
Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, Hemingway went on safari in Africa, where he was nearly killed in a plane crash that left him crippled from pain and poor health for much of the rest of his life.
Hemingway had lived in Key West, Florida and Cuba during the 1930s and 1940s, but in 1959 he left Cuba for Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961.
Life of Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park near Chicago on July 21, 1899. He is the son of Clarence Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall, a musician whose father was a wealthy cutlery wholesaler. He was the second child in a family of six:Marceline, born in 1898, Ernest, Ursula, born in 1902, Madeleine, born in 1904, Carol, born in 1911, and finally, Leicester Clarence, born in 1915. Both of his parents were well-educated and well-liked and respected in the conservative Oak Park community. When Clarence and Grace married in 1896, they moved in with Grace's father, Ernest Hall, which is why they named their first son Ernest. Hemingway said he didn't like his first name, which he associated with the naive, even crazy hero of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. The family's seven-bedroom home in a respectable neighborhood contained a music studio for Grace and a dental practice for Clarence.
Hemingway's mother often gave concerts in the surrounding villages. Adult Hemingway claimed to hate his mother, although biographer Michael Reynolds points out that Hemingway reflected her energy and enthusiasm. His insistence on teaching him to play the cello became a "source of conflict", but he later admitted that the music lessons served him well in his writing, such as in the "contrapuntal structure" of For Whom the Bell Tolls . The family owned a summer home called Windemere on the shores of Walloon Lake near Detroit, Michigan, an area inhabited by the Ojibway Indians. It was there that Hemingway learned with his father to hunt, fish and camp in the woods. In 1909, his father gave him his first shotgun, for his 10th birthday. His early experiences in nature instilled in him a passion for outdoor adventure and living in remote or isolated areas.
From 1913, Ernest studied at Oak Park High School. He discovers Shakespeare, Dickens, Stevenson, and actively participates in the sporting and cultural life of his school. In 1916, his first stories and poems appeared in Tabula and Trapeze, the school's literary journals. After graduating in 1917, Hemingway gave up college to become a reporter for the Kansas City Star, under the benevolent influence of his paternal uncle, Alfred Tyler Hemingway.
First World War
When the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, Hemingway's draft was refused for the first time because of a failing eye. In April 1918, however, he managed to join the Italian Red Cross and after crossing the Atlantic on the Chicago, he landed in Bordeaux, reached Paris, then Milan, where he arrived on June 6. After several weeks at the rear, he joined the front. On July 8, 1918, at night, near Fossalta di Piave, while he was bringing chocolate and cigarettes to the soldiers, a mortar shot wounded Hemingway in the legs, killed one of his comrades and seriously injured two others. As he tries to bring a comrade back, he is again injured by machine gun fire, but manages to get to an aid station, before fainting. During his three-month convalescence in a hospital in Milan, he fell in love with an American nurse Agnes Von Kurowsky, who was 8 years older than him and who inspired him to play the character of Catherine Barkley in Farewell to Arms.
In March 1921, Ernest Hemingway, a journalist with the Greek troops, testifies to the violence of the confrontation at Inönü in Anatolia, during the Greco-Turkish war.
Hired in November 1921 as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, he moved to Paris, where he lived, with his wife Hadley, on the third floor of 74 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, in the Latin Quarter of Paris, from January 1922 to August 1923. It was in Paris that he made the acquaintance of Gertrude Stein, the high priestess of modernism, who was his mentor before falling out with him, but who in the meantime introduced him to the American "expats" and the painters whom she discovered with her brother (Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Juan Gris…)
First novels
Hemingway has great difficulty readjusting to civilian life after this long period of war. He married Hadley Richardson and moved with her to Paris in 1921. It was from this period that he spent a lot of time writing. Mainly inspired by Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, he is renowned for his very concentrated stories, in a stripped down and laconic style, testifying to his experience of life and death.
After an unpopular collection of short stories (Nowadays), he released his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926. This bestseller allows him to quickly establish himself in the literary scene. The title refers to Ecclesiastes (chap I, 3-7) and the main theme of the book is already the lost generation. Disoriented young people evolve in a lost and absurd world, unable to fill the emptiness of their lives.
In his second novel, Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes about the First World War. Released in 1929, 11 years after the end of the war, the story is scathing and ironic. It is no coincidence that it is published so late:in its implicit aesthetic, an emotion is only evoked once the emotion has passed. An American paramedic, gone to Switzerland with a young English nurse, realizes that he is trapped in a Destiny he thought he had escaped. If the title is borrowed from an English patriotic poem, the work is in no way laudatory. On the contrary, it highlights the meaninglessness of this war. The feeling of love is not spared either, which makes the work very pessimistic.
However, despite the disenchantment conveyed by his early novels, Hemingway gradually manages to forget the horror of war and the absurdity of life. He particularly indulges in two pastimes:horse racing and hunting.
Individualism then commitment
After his second marriage, Hemingway moved to Key West, Florida in the year 1928. Then he moved to Cuba to live near Havana until 1960(?). Completely detached from the social and geopolitical context, he spends most of his days fishing for swordfish in his yacht and learning about sports and literary news. Then he realizes that one cannot live forever withdrawn from others, which inspires him to write a new novel, published in 1937:To have it or not. Harry Morgan, for lack of money to feed his family, embarks on all sorts of adventures to which he ends up succumbing. Faithful representative of American individualism, he realizes only too late "[that] a man alone is screwed in advance".
This work marks a break in the solitary existence of Hemingway. Fascism at the gates of Spain did not leave him indifferent. Aware that he could not live apart indefinitely, he chose to join the Spanish Civil War in 1937.
Spanish War
He will take part as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War, alongside the Republicans. He wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel that would make him all the more famous, published in 1940 after the victory of the Francoists in Spain. This novel is as much an adventure story as a war report, where exhilarating epics, ancient tragedies and meditations on the destiny of Man mingle. It was during this period that he met Malraux. The carnage he witnesses convinces him of the emptiness and falsehood of abstract language.
Style change
“What is needed is to write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know. In the short story On Writing, his favorite character, Nick Adams, declares that he wants to “write as Cézanne paints”.
World War II
Hemingway returned to Europe at the end of World War II, from June to December 1944. At the time of the Normandy landings, military officials who considered him "precious cargo", left him on a landing craft, contrary to claims of Hemingway who claimed to have gone ashore. Towards the end of July he was attached to the 22nd Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel Charles Buck Lanaham, which was heading for Paris and he took the lead of a small group of combatants at Rambouillet, in the distant suburbs of Paris. Of Hemingway's exploits, World War II writer and historian Paul Fussell remarks:"Hemingway created considerable embarrassment by playing captain of infantry for a group of resistance fighters he had assembled, for a correspondent of war is not supposed to lead troops, even if he does it well”. This was contrary to the Geneva Conventions, and Hemingway was formally accused, but got away with it by claiming that he had merely given advice.
He succeeded in have an interview with General Philippe de Hauteclocque, said Leclerc when the latter, pressed by General de Gaulle, was wondering if he would invest Paris despite the ban imposed on him by his American hierarchy. Hemingway showed up in half-military, half-civilian garb and asked for a reconnaissance tank, two or three jeeps and half a dozen men to clear the Ritz bar. Hemingway kept a bad image of this general who ejected him by calling him a clown. On August 25, he was present at the liberation of Paris, although claims that he entered the city first, or that he liberated the Ritz are considered part of legend. In Paris, he attended a meeting organized by Sylvia Beach and made peace with Gertrude Stein. Hemingway was present during heavy fighting in the forest of Hürtgen towards the end of 1944. On December 17, sick and feverish, Hemingway was driven to Luxembourg to cover what would later be called the Battle of the Bulge. However, as soon as he arrived, Lanaham took him to the doctors, who hospitalized him with pneumonia, and when he was released from the hospital a week later, the main fights were over.
Literary recognition
Ernest Hemingway is a representative of the "lost generation", an expression he uses in The Sun Also Rises, invented by Gertrude Stein to talk about Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot during the period of Paris is a party.
The author evokes the great political battles of the century (such as the war in Spain), surpassing oneself or the taste for adventure, in a journalistic, even "telegraphic" way, as explained by the French translator of his two first novels, Maurice Edgar Coindreau. For Hemingway, aesthetics implies above all an ethics and not a metaphysics (as Sartre wrote about Faulkner). His work was crowned with the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 28, 1954 "for the powerful and new style by which he mastered the art of modern narration, as The Old Man and the Sea has just proven". He will give in Stockholm, before the jury of the Swedish Academy, the briefest speech in the history of this institution.
Suicide
When he returned to the United States in September 1960, after trips to Cuba and Spain, he was not doing very well, neither physically nor mentally. He has become impotent, feels like he is going blind from diabetes, and is afflicted with madness (actually bipolar disorder which he has suffered all his life). In December, doctor George Saviers sent him for treatment at the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he was treated with shock therapy and sedatives. He came out in January 1961, but three months later, he had to return to hospital, first at Sun Valley Hospital, then again at the Mayo Clinic, where he received new electroshocks. He returned home on June 30, and two days later, on July 2, 1961, he committed suicide with a gunshot. He once blamed his father for his suicide, considering it an act of cowardice.
Hemingway's medical records, made available in 1991, showed that he suffered from hemochromatosis (diagnosed in 1961), a genetic disease that causes severe physical and mental damage. This disease could explain the numerous suicides in the Hemingway family (his father, his brother, his sister and his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway).
His marriages
Ernest Hemingway was married four times:
Hadley Richardson from September 3, 1921 to January 1927. One child, Jack. The actresses Mariel Hemingway and Margaux Hemingway are his daughters (therefore Ernest's granddaughters).
Pauline Pfeiffer (en) from May 10, 1927 to November 4, 1940. Two children.
Martha Gellhorn from November 1940 (three weeks after her divorce) to 1945.
Mary Welsh Hemingway from March 1946 until Hemingway's suicide.
He is the godfather of the French comedian Claude Brasseur.
Main works
Farewell to Arms (1929)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)