Ernest (Miller) Hemingway1899-1961Entry Updated : 08/01/2001 Birth Place: Oak Park, Illinois, United States Death Place: Ketchum, Idaho, United States Personal InformationCareerWritingsMedia AdaptationsSidelightsFurther Readings About the AuthorPersonal Information: Family: Born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park Illinois,United States; committed suicide, July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho, UnitedStates son of Clarence Edmunds (a physician) and Grace (a music teacher;maiden name, Hall) Hemingway: married Hadley Richardson, September 3, 1921(divorced March 10, 1927); married Pauline Pfeiffer (a writer), May 10,1927 (divorced November 4, 1940); married Martha Gellhorn (a writer), November21, 1940 (divorced December 21, 1945); married Mary Welsh (a writer), March14, 1946; children: (first marriage) John Hadley Nicanor; (second marriage)Patrick, Gregory. Education: Educated in Oak Park, IL. Career: Writer, 1917-61.
Kansas City Star, Kansas City, MO, cub reporter,1917-18; ambulance driver for Red Cross Ambulance Corps in Italy, 1918-19;Co-operative Commonwealth, Chicago, writer, 1920-21; Toronto Star, Toronto,Ontario, covered Greco-Turkish War, 1920, European correspondent, 1921-24;covered Spanish Civil War for North American Newspaper Alliance, 1937-38;war correspondent in China, 1941; war correspondent in Europe, 1944-45. Awards: Pulitzer Prize, 1953, for The Old Man and the Sea; Nobel Prizefor Literature, 1954; Award of Merit from American Academy of Arts & Letters,1954. WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:NOVELS * The Torrents of Spring: A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing ofa Great Race (parody), Scribner, 1926, published with a new introductionby David Garnett, J. Cape, 1964, reprinted, Scribner, 1972. * The Sun Also Rises, Scribner, 1926, published with a new introductionby Henry Seidel Canby, Modern Library, 1930, reprinted, Scribner, 1969(published in England as Fiesta, J. Cape, 1959).
* A Farewell to Arms, Scribner, 1929, published with new introductionsby Ford Madox Ford, Modern Library, 1932, Robert Penn Warren, Scribner,1949, John C. Schweitzer, Scribner, 1967. * To Have and Have Not, Scribner, 1937, J. Cape, 1970. * For Whom the Bell Tolls, Scribner, 1940, published with a new introductionby Sinclair Lewis, Princeton University Press, 1942, reprinted, Scribner,1960.
* Across the River and Into the Trees, Scribner, 1950, reprinted, Penguinwith J. Cape, 1966. * The Old Man and the Sea, Scribner 1952. * Islands in the Stream, Scribner, 1970. * The Garden of Eden, Scribner, 1986.
* Patrick Hemingway, editor, True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir,Simon & Schuster, 1999. SHORT STORIES, EXCEPT AS INDICATED * Three Stories & Ten Poems, Contact (Paris), 1923. * In Our Time, Boni & Liveright, 1925, published with additional materialand new introduction by Edmund Wilson, Scribner, 1930, reprinted, Bruccoli,1977 (also see below). * Men Without Women, Scribner, 1927. * Winner Take Nothing, Scribner, 1933. * Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (stories and a play),Scribner, 1938, stories published separately as First Forty-nine Stories,J.
Cape, 1962, play published separately as The Fifth Column: A Play inThree Acts, Scribner, 1940, J. Cape, 1968 (also see below). * The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Scribner, 1938. * The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, Scribner, 1961. * The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories, Penguin,1963.
* Hemingway’s African Stories: The Stories, Their Sources, Their Critics,compiled by John M. Howell, Scribner, 1969. * The Nick Adams Stories, preface by Philip Young, Scribner, 1972. * (Contributor) Peter Griffin, Along With Youth (biography that includesfive previously unpublished short stories: Crossroads, The Mercenaries,The Ash-Heel’s Tendon, The Current, and Portrait of the Idealist in Love),Oxford University Press, 1985. * The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition,Scribner, 1987. OTHER * in our time (miniature sketches), Three Mountain Press (Paris), 1924(also see above).
* Today Is Friday (pamphlet), As Stable Publications (Englewood, N. J. ),1926. * Death in the Afternoon (nonfiction), Scribner, 1932. * God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, House of Books, 1933.
* Green Hills of Africa (nonfiction), Scribner, 1935, reprinted, Penguinwith J. Cape, 1966. * The Spanish Earth (commentary and film narration), introduction byJasper Wood, J. B.
Savage (Cleveland, Ohio), 1938. * The Spanish War (monograph), Fact, 1938. * (Editor and author of introduction) Men at War: The Best War Storiesof All Time (based on a plan by William Kozlenko), Crown, 1942. * Voyage to Victory, Crowell-Collier, 1944. * The Secret Agent’s Badge of Courage, Belmont Books, 1954. * Two Christmas Tales, Hart Press, 1959.
* A Moveable Feast (reminiscences), Scribner, 1964. * Collected Poems, Haskell, 1970. * The Collected Poems of Ernest Hemingway, Gordon Press, 1972. * Ernest Hemingway: Eighty-Eight Poems, Harcourt, 1979. * Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961, Scribner, 1981.
* Complete Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, University of NebraskaPress, 1983. * Hemingway on Writing, Scribner, 1984. * The Dangerous Summer (nonfiction), introduction by James A. Michener,Scribner, 1985. * Conversations With Ernest Hemingway, University Press of Mississippi,1986.
* Hemingway at Oak Park High: The High School Writings of Ernest Hemingway,1916-1917 Alpine Guild, 1993. * Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/MaxwellPerkins Correspondence, 1925-1947, Scribner, 1996. OMNIBUS VOLUMES * The Portable Hemingway (contains The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell toArms, To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and short stories),edited by Malcolm Cowley, Viking, 1944. * The Essential Hemingway (contains one novel, novel extracts, and twenty-threeshort stories), J. Cape, 1947, reprinted, 1964.
* The Hemingway Reader, edited with foreword by Charles Poore, Scribner,1953. * Three Novels: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Manand the Sea, each with separate introductions by Malcolm Cowley, RobertPenn Warren, and Carlos Baker, respectively, Scribner, 1962. * The Wild Years (collection of journalism), edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan,Dell, 1962.
* By-line, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of FourDecades, edited by William White, Scribner, 1967. * Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War, Scribner, 1969(also see above). * Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter: Kansas City Star Stories, edited byMatthew J. Bruccoli, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. * Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916-1917, edited by Bruccoli,Bruccoli Clark NCR Microcard Editions, 1971. * The Enduring Hemingway: An Anthology of a Lifetime in Literature, editedby Charles Scribner, Jr.
, Scribner, 1974. * Dateline–Toronto: Hemingway’s Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, editedby White, Scribner, 1985. * The Short Stories, Scribner, 1997. Media Adaptations: Several of Hemingway’s works have been adapted formotion pictures, including For Whom the Bell Tolls; To Have and Have Not;The Sun Also Rises, screenplay by Peter Viertel, Twentieth Century-Fox,1956; A Farewell to Arms, screenplay by Ben Hecht, The Selznick Co.
, 1957;and The Old Man and the Sea, screenplay by Peter Viertel, Warner Bros. ,1957. The Snows of Kilimanjaro: A Full-length Play, based on Hemingway’sshort story, was written by Bryan Patrick Harnetiaux, Dramatic Publications(Woodstock, IL), 1995. “Sidelights””The writer’s job is to tell the truth,” Ernest Hemingway oncesaid. When he was having difficulty writing he reminded himself of this,as he explained in his memoirs, A Moveable Feast. “I would stand and lookout over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry.
You have always writtenbefore and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. ‘ So finally I would write onetrue sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because therewas always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someonesay.
” Hemingway’s personal and artistic quests for truth were directly related. As Earl Rovit noted: “More often than not, Hemingway’s fictions seem rootedin his journeys into himself much more clearly and obsessively than isusually the case with major fiction writers. . . . His writing was his wayof approaching his identity–of discovering himself in the projected metaphorsof his experience.
He believed that if he could see himself clear and whole,his vision might be useful to others who also lived in this world. ” The public’s acquaintance with the personal life of Hemingway was perhapsgreater than with any other modern novelist. He was well known as a sportsmanand bon vivant and his escapades were covered in such popular magazinesas Life and Esquire. Hemingway became a legendary figure, wrote John W.
Aldridge, “a kind of twentieth-century Lord Byron; and like Byron, he hadlearned to play himself, his own best hero, with superb conviction. Hewas Hemingway of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing besidea marlin he had just landed or a lion he had just shot; he was Tarzan Hemingway,crouching in the African bush with elephant gun at ready, Bwana Hemingwaycommanding his native bearers in terse Swahili; he was War CorrespondentHemingway writing a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty Fascistshells crashed through the roof; later on he was Task Force Hemingway swathedin ammunition belts and defending his post singlehanded against fierceGerman attacks. ” Anthony Burgess declared: “Reconciling literature andaction, he fulfilled for all writers, the sickroom dream of leaving thedesk for the arena, and then returning to the desk. He wrote good and livedgood, and both activities were the same. The pen handled with the accuracyof the rifle; sweat and dignity; bags of cojones.
” Hemingway’s search for truth and accuracy of expression is reflected inhis terse, economical prose style, which is widely acknowledged to be hisgreatest contribution to literature. What Frederick J. Hoffman called Hemingway’s”esthetic of simplicity” involves a “basic struggle for absolute accuracyin making words correspond to experience. ” For Hemingway, William Barrettcommented, “style was a moral act, a desperate struggle for moral probityamid the confusions of the world and the slippery complexities of one’sown nature.
To set things down simple and right is to hold a standard ofrightness against a deceiving world. ” In a discussion of Hemingway’s style, Sheldon Norman Grebstein listedthese characteristics: “first, short and simple sentence constructions,with heavy use of parallelism, which convey the effect of control, terseness,and blunt honesty; second, purged diction which above all eschews the useof bookish, latinate, or abstract words and thus achieves the effect ofbeing heard or spoken or transcribed from reality rather than appearingas a construct of the imagination (in brief, verisimilitude); and third,skillful use of repetition and a kind of verbal counterpoint, which operateeither by pairing or juxtaposing opposites, or else by running the sameword or phrase through a series of shifting meanings and inflections. “One of Hemingway’s greatest virtues as a writer was his self-discipline. He described how he accomplished this in A Moveable Feast. “If I startedto write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something,I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it awayand start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. .
. . I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good andsevere discipline. ” His early training in journalism as a reporter forthe Kansas City Star and the Toronto Star is often mentioned as a factorin the development of his lean style. Later, as a foreign correspondenthe learned the even more rigorously economic language of “cablese,” inwhich each word must convey the meaning of several others.
While Hemingwayacknowledged his debt to journalism in Death in the Afternoon by commentingthat “in writing for a newspaper you told what happened and with one trickand another, you communicated the emotion to any account of something thathas happened on that day,” he admitted that the hardest part of fictionwriting, “the real thing,” was contriving “the sequence of motion and factwhich made the emotion and which would be valid in a year or ten yearsor, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always. ” Although Hemingway has named numerous writers as his literary influences,his contemporaries mentioned most often in this regard are Ring Lardner,Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. Malcolm Cowley assessedthe importance of Stein and Pound (who were both friends of Hemingway)to his literary development, while stressing that the educational relationshipwas mutual. “One thing he took partly from her Stein was a colloquial–inappearance–American style, full of repeated words, prepositional phrases,and present participles, the style in which he wrote his early publishedstories. One thing he took from Pound–in return for trying vainly to teachhim to box–was the doctrine of the accurate image, which he applied inthe ‘chapters’ printed between the stories that went into In Our Time;but Hemingway also learned from him to bluepencil most of his adjectives. “Hemingway has commented that he learned how to write as much from paintersas from other writers.
Cezanne was one of his favorite painters and WrightMorris has compared Hemingway’s stylistic method to that of Cezanne. “ACezanne-like simplicity of scene is built up with the touches of a master,and the great effects are achieved with a sublime economy. At these momentsstyle and substance are of one piece, each growing from the other, andone cannot imagine that life could exist except as described. We thinkonly of what is there, and not, as in the less successful moments, of allof the elements of experience that are not. ” While most critics have found Hemingway’s prose exemplary (Jackson J.
Benson claimed that he had “perhaps the best ear that has ever been broughtto the creation of English prose”), Leslie A. Fiedler complained that Hemingwaylearned to write “through the eye rather than the ear. If his languageis colloquial, it is written colloquial, for he was constitutionally incapableof hearing English as it was spoken around him. To a critic who once askedhim why his characters all spoke alike, Hemingway answered, ‘Because Inever listen to anybody.
‘” Hemingway’s earlier novels and short stories were largely praised fortheir unique style. Paul Goodman, for example, was pleased with the “sweetness”of the writing in A Farewell to Arms. “When it sweetness appears, theshort sentences coalesce and flow, and sing– sometimes melancholy, sometimespastoral, sometimes personally embarrassed in an adult, not adolescent,way. In the dialogues, he pays loving attention to the spoken word.
Andthe writing is meticulous; he is sweetly devoted to writing well. Mosteverything else is resigned, but here he makes an effort, and the effortproduces lovely moments. ” But in his later works, particularly Across the River and Into the Treesand the posthumously published Islands in the Stream, the Hemingway styledegenerated into near self-parody. “In the best of early Hemingway it alwaysseemed that if exactly the right words in exactly the right order werenot chosen, something monstrous would occur, an unimaginably delicate internalwarning system would be thrown out of adjustment, and some principle ofpersonal and artistic integrity would be fatally compromised,” John Aldridgewrote. “But by the time he came to write The Old Man and the Sea thereseems to have been nothing at stake except the professional obligationto sound as much like Hemingway as possible. The man had disappeared behindthe mannerism, the artist behind the artifice, and all that was left wasa coldly flawless facade of words.
” Foster Hirsch found that Hemingway’s”mawkish self-consciousness is especially evident in Islands in the Stream. “Across the River and Into the Trees, according to Philip Rahv, “readslike a parody by the author of his own manner–a parody so biting thatit virtually destroys the mixed social and literary legend of Hemingway. “And Carlos Baker wrote: “In the lesser works of his final years . . .
nostalgiadrove him to the point of exploiting his personal idiosyncrasies, as ifhe hoped to persuade readers to accept these in lieu of that powerful unionof objective discernment and subjective response which he had once beenable to achieve. ” But Hemingway was never his own worst imitator. He was perhaps the mostinfluential writer of his generation and scores of writers, particularlythe hard-boiled writers of the thirties, attempted to adapt his tough,understated prose to their own works, usually without success. As ClintonS.
Burhans, Jr. , noted: “The famous and extraordinarily eloquent concretenessof Hemingway’s style is inimitable precisely because it is not primarilystylistic: the how of Hemingway’s style is the what of his characteristicvision. ” It is this organicism, the skillful blend of style and substance, thatmade Hemingway’s works so successful, despite the fact that many criticshave complained that he lacked vision. Hemingway avoided intellectualismbecause he thought it shallow and pretentious. His unique vision demandedthe expression of emotion through the description of action rather thanof passive thought.
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained, “Iwas trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside fromknowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposedto feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actualthings were which produced the emotion you experienced. ” Even morality, for Hemingway, was a consequence of action and emotion. He stated his moral code in Death in the Afternoon: “What is moral is whatyou feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. ” LadyBrett Ashley, in The Sun Also Rises, voices this pragmatic morality aftershe has decided to leave a young bullfighter, believing the break to bein his best interests.
She says: “You know it makes one feel rather gooddeciding not to be a bitch. . . . It’s sort of what we have instead of God.
“Hemingway’s perception of the world as devoid of traditional values andtruths and instead marked by disillusionment and moribund idealism, isa characteristically twentieth-century vision. World War I was a watershedfor Hemingway and his generation. As an ambulance driver in the Italianinfantry, Hemingway had been severely wounded. The war experience affectedhim profoundly, as he told Malcolm Cowley. “In the first war I was hurtvery badly; in the body, mind, and spirit, and also morally. ” The heroesof his novels were similarly wounded.
According to Max Westbrook they “awaketo a world gone to hell. World War I has destroyed belief in the goodnessof national governments. The depression has isolated man from his naturalbrotherhood. Institutions, concepts, and insidious groups of friends andways of life are, when accurately seen, a tyranny, a sentimental or propagandisticrationalization.
” Both of Hemingway’s first two major novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewellto Arms, were “primarily descriptions of a society that had lost the possibilityof belief. They were dominated by an atmosphere of Gothic ruin, boredom,sterility and decay,” John Aldridge wrote. “Yet if they had been nothingmore than descriptions, they would inevitably have been as empty of meaningas the thing they were describing. ” While Alan Lebowitz contended thatbecause the theme of despair “is always an end in itself, the fiction merelyits transcription,. . .
it is a dead end,” Aldridge believed that Hemingwaymanaged to save the novels by salvaging the characters’ values and transcribingthem “into a kind of moral network that linked them together in a unifiedpattern of meaning. ” In the search for meaning Hemingway’s characters necessarily confrontviolence. Omnipresent violence is a fact of existence, according to Hemingway. Even in works such as The Sun Also Rises in which violence plays a minimalrole, it is always present subliminally–“woven into the structure of lifeitself,” William Barrett remarked. In other works violence is more obtrusive:the wars in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the hostilityof nature which is particularly evident in the short stories, and the violentsports such as bullfighting and big game hunting that are portrayed innumerous works.
“Hemingway is the dramatist of the extreme situation. His overriding themeis honour, personal honour: by what shall a man live, by what shall a mandie, in a world the essential condition of whose being is violence?” WalterAllen wrote. “These problems are posed rather than answered in his firstbook In Our Time, a collection of short stories in which almost all ofHemingway’s later work is contained by implication. ” The code by which Hemingway’s heroes must live (Philip Young has termedthem “code heroes”) is contingent on the qualities of courage, self-control,and “grace under pressure. ” Irving Howe has described the typical Hemingwayhero as a man “who is wounded but bears his wounds in silence, who is defeatedbut finds a remnant of dignity in an honest confrontation of defeat.
” Furthermore,the hero’s great desire must be to “salvage from the collapse of sociallife a version of stoicism that can make suffering bearable; the hope thatin direct physical sensation, the cold water of the creek in which onefishes or the purity of the wine made by Spanish peasants, there can befound an experience that can resist corruption. ” Hemingway has been accused of exploiting and sensationalizing violence. However, Leo Gurko remarked that “the motive behind Hemingway’s heroicfigures is not glory, or fortune, or the righting of injustice, or thethirst for experience. They are inspired neither by vanity nor ambitionnor a desire to better the world.
They have no thoughts of reaching a stateof higher grace or virtue. Instead, their behavior is a reaction to themoral emptiness of the universe, an emptiness that they feel compelledto fill by their own special efforts. ” If life is an endurance contest and the hero’s response to it is prescribedand codified, the violence itself is stylized. As William Barrett asserted:”It is always played, even in nature, perhaps above all in nature, accordingto some form. The violence erupts within the patterns of war or the patternsof the bullring.
” Clinton S. Burhans, Jr. , is convinced that Hemingway’s”fascination with bullfighting stems from his view of it as an art form,a ritual tragedy in which man confronts the creatural realities of violence,pain, suffering, and death by imposing on them an esthetic form which givesthem order, significance, and beauty. ” It is not necessary (or even possible) to understand the complex universe–itis enough for Hemingway’s heroes to find solace in beauty and order. Santiagoin The Old Man and the Sea cannot understand why he must kill the greatfish he has come to love, Burhans noted.
Hemingway described Santiago’sconfusion: “I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is goodwe do not try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough tolive on the sea and kill our brothers. ” Despite Hemingway’s pessimism, Ihab Hassan declared that it is “perverseto see only the emptiness of Hemingway’s world. In its lucid spaces, avision of archetypal unity reigns.
Opposite forces obey a common destiny;enemies discover their deeper identity; the hunter and the hunted merge. The matador plunges his sword, and for an instant in eternity, man andbeast are the same. This is the moment of truth, and it serves Hemingwayas symbol of the unity which underlies both love and death. His fatalism,his tolerance of bloodshed, his stoical reserve before the malice of creation,betray a sacramental attitude that transcends any personal fate. ” Death is not the ultimate fear: the Hemingway hero knows how to confrontdeath.
What he truly fears is nada (the Spanish word for nothing)-existencein a state of nonbeing. Hemingway’s characters are alone. He is not concernedwith human relationships as much as with portraying man’s individual struggleagainst an alien, chaotic universe. His characters exist in the “islandcondition,” Stephen L.
Tanner has noted. He compared them to the islandsof an archipelago “consistently isolated and alone in the stream of society. “Several critics have noted that Hemingway’s novels suffer because of hisoverriding concern with the individual. For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novelabout the Spanish Civil War, has engendered controversy on this matter.
While it is ostensibly a political novel about a cause that Hemingway believedin fervently, critics such as Alvah C. Bessie were disappointed that Hemingwaywas still concerned exclusively with the personal. “The cause of Spaindoes not, in any essential way, figure as a motivating power, a driving,emotional, passional force in this story. ” Bessie wrote.
“In the widestsense, that cause is actually irrelevant to the narrative. For the authoris less concerned with the fate of the Spanish people, whom I am certainhe loves, than he is with the fate of his hero and heroine, who are himself. . . . For all his groping the author of the Bell has yet to integrate his individualsensitivity to life with the sensitivity of every living human being (readthe Spanish people); he has yet to expand his personality as a novelistto embrace the truths of other people, everywhere; he has yet to dive deepinto the lives of others, and there to find his own.
” But Mark Schorercontended that in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway’s motive is to portray”a tremendous sense of man’s dignity and worth, an urgent awareness ofthe necessity of man’s freedom, a nearly poetic realization of man’s collectivevirtues. Indeed, the individual vanishes in the political whole, but vanishesprecisely to defend his dignity, his freedom, his virtue. In spite of theominous premium which the title seems to place on individuality, the realtheme of the book is the relative unimportance of individuality and thesuperb importance of the political whole. ” Hemingway’s depiction of relationships between men and women is generallyconsidered to be his weakest area as a writer. Leslie A. Fiedler has notedthat he is only really comfortable dealing with men without women.
Hiswomen characters often seem to be abstractions rather than portraits ofreal women. Often reviewers have divided them into two types: the bitchessuch as Brett and Margot Macomber who emasculate the men in their lives,and the wish-projections, the sweet, submissive women such as Catherineand Maria (in For Whom the Bell Tolls). All of the characterizations lacksubtlety and shading. The love affair between Catherine and Frederic inA Farewell to Arms is only an “abstraction of lyric emotion,” Edmund Wilsoncommented. Fiedler complained that “in his earlier fiction, Hemingway’sdescriptions of the sexual encounter are intentionally brutal, in his laterones, unintentionally comic; for in no case, can he quite succeed in makinghis females human. .
. . If in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway has writtenthe most absurd love scene in the history of the American novel, this isnot because he lost momentarily his skill and authority; it is a give-away–amoment which illuminates the whole erotic content of his fiction. ” In 1921, when Hemingway and his family moved to the Left Bank of Paris(then the literature, art, and music capital of the world), he became associatedwith other American expatriates, including F.
Scott Fitzgerald, ArchibaldMacLeish, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos. These expatriates and thewhole generation which came of age in the period between the two worldwars came to be known as the “lost generation.
” For Hemingway the termhad more universal meaning. In A Moveable Feast he wrote that being lostis part of the human condition–that all generations are lost generations. Hemingway also believed in the cyclicality of the world. As inscriptionsto his novel The Sun Also Rises, he used two quotations: first, GertrudeStein’s comment, “You are all a lost generation”; then a verse from Ecclesiasteswhich begins, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh;but the earth abideth forever.
. . . ” The paradox of regeneration evolvingfrom death is central to Hemingway’s vision. The belief in immortalityis comforting, of course, and Hemingway evidently found comfort in permanenceand endurance.
According to Steven R. Phillips, Hemingway discovered permanencein “the sense of immortality that he gains from the otherwise impermanentart of the bullfight, in the fact that the ‘earth abideth forever,’ inthe eternal flow of the gulf stream and in the permanence of his own worksof art. ” Hemingway’s greatest depiction of endurance is in The Old Manand the Sea in which “he succeeds in a manner which almost defeats criticaldescription,” Phillips claimed. “The old man becomes the sea and like thesea he endures. He is dying as the year is dying.
He is fishing in September,the fall of the year, the time that corresponds in the natural cycle tothe phase of sunset and sudden death. . . . Yet the death of the old man willnot bring an end to the cycle; as part of the sea he will continue to exist. “Hemingway was inordinately proud of his own powers of rejuvenation, andin a letter to his friend Archibald MacLeish, he explained that his maximwas: “Dans la vie, il faut (d’abord) durer.
” (“In life, one must firstof all endure. “) He had survived physical disasters (including two near-fatalplane crashes in Africa in 1954) and disasters of critical reception tohis work (Across the River and Into the Trees was almost universally panned). But due to his great recuperative powers he was able to rebound from thesehardships. He made a literary comeback with the publication of The OldMan and the Sea, which is considered to be among his finest works. In 1954he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But the last few years ofhis life were marked by great physical and emotional suffering. He wasno longer able to write–to do the thing he loved the most. Finally Hemingwaycould endure no longer and, in 1961, he took his own life. In the 1980s Scribner published two additional posthumous works– TheDangerous Summer and The Garden of Eden. Written in 1959 while Hemingwaywas in Spain on commission for Life magazine, The Dangerous Summer describesthe intense and bloody competition between two prominent bullfighters. The Garden of Eden, a novel about newlyweds who experience marital conflictwhile traveling through Spain on their honeymoon, was begun by Hemingwayin the 1940s and finished fifteen years later.
While interest in theseworks was high, critics judged neither book to rival the thematic and stylisticachievements of his earlier works, which have made Hemingway a major figurein modern American literature. The fifth of Hemingway’s posthumous publications, a self-termed fictionalmemoir titled True at First Light, was released on July 21, 1999 to conincidewith the 100th anniversary of his birth. The book, edited by Hemingway’smiddle son, Patrick, and paired down to half the length of the originalmanuscript, recounts a Kenyan safari excursion that Heminway took withhis fourth wife, Mary, in 1953. The story centers around Mary’s preoccupationwith killing a lion who is threatening the villagers’ safety, and the narrator’sinvolvement with a woman from the Wakamba tribe, whom he calles his “fiancee. “Many critics expressed disappointment over True at First Light for it’speripatetic lack of vision, its abdication of intellectual intent (whatNew York Times critic James Wood termed “a nullification of thought”) andits tepid prose. Kenneth S.
Lynn, writing for the National Review, pointedout that “Ernest Hemingway’s name is on the cover, but the publicationof True at First Light is an important event in celebrity culture, notin literary culture. For the grim fact is that this ‘fictional memoir’. . . reflects a marvelous writer’s disastrous loss of talent.
” Many ofthe critics pointed to Hemingway’s increasing preoccupation with the mythof his own machismo as a catalyst for the devolution of his writing. NewYork Times critic Michiko Kakutani commented, “As in so much of Hemingway’slater work, all this spinning of his own legend is reflected in the deteriorationof his prose. What was special–and at the time, galvanic–about his earlywriting was its precision and concision: Hemingway not only knew what toleave out, but he also succeeded in turning that austerity into a moraloutlook, a way of looking at a world shattered and remade by World WarI. His early work had a clean, hard objectivity: it did not engage in meaninglessabstractions; it tried to show, not tell. ” True at First Light also inflamed classic critical debate over the trueownership of authorial intention. While Hemingway’s physical and mentaldeterioration, toward the end of his life, rendered his final wishes forunpublished works unclear, many critics have objected to the posthumous”franchise” of his deepest failures, novels that he, himself, abandoned.
James Wood offered the observation that True at Frist Light’s lack of substancemay serve “as a warning to let Hemingway be, both as a literary estateand as a literary influence. ” There is evidence, however, that the literarystorm the book stirred would not have bothered Hemingway much. As Tom Jenkspointed out in a review for Harper’s, “Hemingway’s own belief was thatin a writer’s lifetime his reputation depended on the quantity and medianof his work, but that after his death he would be remembered only for “Sidelights”his best. ” If this is true, then, as one Publishers Weeklyreviewer opined, perhaps True at First Light will “inspire new readersto delve into Hemingway’s true legacy. ” FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:BOOKS * Aldridge, John W. , Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novelin Crisis, McKay, 1966.
* Allen, Walter, The Modern Novel, Dutton, 1964. * Astro, Richard and Jackson J. Benson, editors, Hemingway in Our Time,Oregon State University Press, 1974. * Baker, Carlos, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, Princeton UniversityPress, 1956. * Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Scribner, 1969.
* Baker, editor, Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels, Scribner,1962. * Baldwin, Kenneth H. and David K. Kirby, editors, Individual and Community:Variations on a Theme in American Fiction, Duke University Press, 1975. * Baldwin, Marc D.
, Reading The Sun Also Rises: Hemingway’s PoliticalUnconscious, P. Lang (New York City), 1996. * Barrett, William, Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the TwentiethCentury, Harper, 1972. * Bellavance-Johnson, Marsha, Ernest Hemingway in Idaho: A Guide, ComputerLab. , 1997. * Benson, Jackson J.
, editor, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway:Critical Essays, Duke University Press, 1975. * Bloom, Harold, editor, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, ChelseaHouse (New York City), 1995. * Bloom, editor, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, ChelseaHouse (New York City, 1995. * Bloom, editor, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Chelsea House(New York City), 1995.
* Bruccoli, Matthew J. and C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr.
, editors, Fitzgerald-HemingwayAnnual, Bruccoli Clark Books, 1969-76, Gale, 1977. * Bruccoli, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship, Carroll& Graf (New York City), 1994. * Burgess, Anthony, Urgent Copy: Literary Studies, Norton, 1968. * Burgess, The Novel Now: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction, Norton, 1967. * Burgess, Anthony, Ernest Hemingway and His World, Scribner, 1978. * Burrill, William, Hemingway: The Toronto Years, Doubleday (Toronto),1994.
* Burwell, Rose Marie, Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the PosthumousNovels, Cambrideg University Press (New York City), 1996. * Castillo-Puche, Jose L. , Hemingway in Spain, Doubleday, 1974. * Comley, Nancy R.
, Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text,Yale University Press (New Haven), 1994. * Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The Twenties, 1917-1929,Gale, 1989. * Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973, Volume 3, 1975,Volume 6, 1976, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 13, 1980, Volume 19, 1981, Volume30, 1984, Volume 34, 1985, Volume 39, 1986, Volume 41, 1987, Volume 44,1987, Volume 50, 1988. * Cowley, Malcolm, A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation,Viking, 1973.
* de Koster, Katie, Readings on Ernest Hemingway, Greenhaven Press, 1997. * Dolan, Marc, Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-Reading of the “Lost Generation,”Purdue University Press (West Lafayette, IN), 1996. * Donaldson, Scott, By Force of Will: The Life in Art and Art in theLife of Ernest Hemingway, Viking, 1977. * Donaldson, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, CambridgeUniversity Press (New York City), 1996. * Eby, Carl P.
, Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirrorof Manhood, State University of New York Press, 1998. * Fiedler, Leslie A. , Love and Death in the American Novel, Criterion,1960. * Fiedler, Waiting for the End, Stein & Day, 1964. * Fleming, Robert E.
, The Face in the Mirror: Hemingway’s Writers, Universityof Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa), 1994. * Frohock, W. M. , The Novel of Violence in America, Southern MethodistUniversity Press, 1957. * Geisman, Maxwell, American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity, Hill& Wang, 1958. * Grebstein, Sheldon N.
, Hemingway’s Craft, Southern Illinois UniversityPress, 1973. * Griffin, Peter, Along With Youth, Oxford University Press, 1985. * Gurko, Leo, Ernest Hemingway and the Pursuit of Heroism, Crowell, 1968. * Hardy, Richard E.
and John G. Cull, Hemingway: A Psychological Portrait,Banner Books, 1977. * Hassan, Ihab, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature,Oxford University Press, 1971. * Hemingway, Ernest, A Moveable Feast, Scribner, 1964. * Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, Scribner, 1932.
* Hemingway, Gregory H. , Papa: A Personal Memoir, Houghton, 1976. * Hemingway, Leicester, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 3rd edition, PineapplePress (Sarasota, FL), 1996. * Hemingway, Mary Welsh, How It Was, Knopf, 1976.
* Hoffman, Frederick J. , The Modern Novel in America, Regnery, revisededition, 1963. * Hotchner, A. E. , Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, Bantam, 1966. * Howe, Irving, A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literatureand Politics, Horizon Press, 1963.
* Hunter-Gillespie, Connie, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, illustratedby Richard Fortunato, Research and Education Association (Piscataway, NJ),1996. * Josephs, Allen, For Whom the Bell Tolls: Ernest Hemingway’s UndiscoveredCountry, Macmillan International (New York City), 1994. * Kazin, Alfred, Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellersfrom Hemingway to Mailer, Little, Brown, 1973. * Kennedy, J. Gerald, and Jackson R. Bryer, French Connections: Hemingwayand Fitzgerald Abroad, St.
Martin’s Press, 1998. * Leff, Leonard J. , Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood Scribnersand the Making of American Celebrity Culture, Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. * Lynn, Kenneth Schuyler, Hemingway, Harvard University Press (Cambridge),1995. * Madden, David, editor, Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, SouthernIllinois University Press, 1968. * Mandel, Miriam B.
, Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the Fictions, ScarecrowPress (Metuchen, NJ), 1995. * McDaniel, Melissa, Ernest Hemingway, Chelsea House (New York City),1996. * Mellow, James R. , Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, Addison-Wesley(Reading, MA), 1994. * Monteiro, George, Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell toArms, Macmillan International (New York City), 1994. * Morris, Wright, The Territory Ahead: Critical Interpretations in AmericanLiterature, Harcourt, 1958.
* Nagel, Jems, editor, Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s The SunAlso Rises, G. K. Hall (New York City), 1995. * Nagel, editor, Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy, University ofAlabama Press (Tuscaloosa), 1996. * Nahal, Chaman, The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway’s Fiction,Fairleigh Dickinson, 1971. * Priestley, J.
B. , Literature and Western Man, Harper, 1960. * Rahv, Philip, The Myth and the Powerhouse, Farrar, Straus, 1965. * Reynolds, Michael S. , Hemingway’s First War: The Making of “A Farewellto Arms,” Princeton University Press, 1976. * Reynolds, Michael, Hemingway: The American Homecoming, Blackwell Publishers,1992.
* Reynolds, Hemingway, Norton, 1997. * Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, Norton, 1997. * Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, Norton, 1998. * Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, Norton, 1999. * Reynolds, Hemingway: the Final Years, Norton, 1999. * Reynolds, Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time, Yale UniversityPress, 1999.
* Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming, Norton, 1999. * Rogal, Samuel J. , For Whom the Dinner Bell Tolls: The Role and Functionof Food and Drink in the Prose of Ernest Hemingway, International ScholarsPublications (San Francisco), 1996. * Rosen, Kenneth Mark, editor, Hemingway Repossessed, Praeger (Westport,CT), 1994.
* Rovit, Earl R. , Ernest Hemingway, Twayne, 1963. * Seward, William, My Friend Ernest Hemingway, A. S. Barnes, 1969.
* Smith, Paul, ed. , New Essays on Hemingway’s Short Fiction, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998. * Stephens, Robert O. , Hemingway’s Nonfiction: The Public Voice, Universityof North Carolina Press, 1968. * Szenes, Dominique, Ernest Hemingway, Park Avenue (Paris), 1994.
* Tessitore, John, The Hunt and the Feast: A Life of Ernest Hemingway,Franklin Watts (New York City), 1996. * Unfried, Sarah P. , Man’s Place in the Natural Order: A Study of ErnestHemingway’s Major Works, Gordon Press, 1976. * Updike, John, Picked-Up Pieces, Knopf, 1975. * Von Kurowsky, Agnes, (edited by Henry Serrano Villard and James Nagel),Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky, Hyperion,1996. * Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed.
, Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism,Michigan State University Press, 1998. * Waldhorn, Arthur, Ernest Hemingway, McGraw, 1973. * Westbrook, Max, editor, The Modern American Novel: Essays in Criticism,Random House, 1966. * Wylder, Delbert E. , Hemingway’s Heroes, University of New Mexico Press,1969. * Yannuzzi, Della A.
, Ernest Hemingway: Writer and Adventurer, EnslowPublishers, 1998. * Young, Philip, Ernest Hemingway, University of Minnesota Press, revisededition, 1965. * Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 2nd edition, 1966. PERIODICALS * American Scholar, summer, 1974.
* Arizona Quarterly, spring, 1973. * Booklist, April 15, 1999, p. 1452. * Chicago Tribune, July 17, 1986.
* Chicago Tribune Book World, October 13, 1985; May 4, 1986; August24, 1986. * Denver Post, July 18, 1999. * Detroit News, June 9, 1985. * Forbes, September 26, 1994.
* Georgia Review, summer, 1977. * Globe and Mail (Toronto), November 30, 1985; May 31, 1986. * Harper’s May, 1999, p. 53. * Kenyon Review, winter, 1941. * Library Journal, May 1, 1999, p.
79; June 15, 1999, p. 113. * Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1986; January 25, 1987. * Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 23, 1985. * Mediterranean Review, spring, 1971.
* Midwest Quarterly, spring, 1976. * Modern Fiction Studies, summer, 1975. * Nation, June 14, 1999, p. 24. * National Review, November 7, 1994, p.
80; June 28, 1999, p. 50. * New Masses, November 5, 1940. * Newsweek, May 19, 1986; April 12, 1999, p. 70.
* New Yorker, May 13, 1950. * New York Review of Books, December 30, 1971. * New York Times, June 1, 1985; May 21, 1986; July 24, 1989; August17, 1989; June 22, 1999; July 11, 1999. * New York Times Book Review, June 9, 1985; May 18, 1986. * New York Times Magazine, August 18, 1985. * Observer, February 8, 1987.
* Publishers Weekly, January 11, 1985; May 10, 1999, p. 53. * Southwest Review, winter, 1976. * Time, May 26, 1986; July 5, 1999, p. 76+.
* Times (London), July 18, 1985; August 1, 1986; February 12, 1989. * Washington Post, July 29, 1987. * Washington Post Book World, June 30, 1985; November 3, 1985; June1, 1986. * Yale Review, spring, 1969.
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