Ernest Hemingway His Life In His Work

Ernest Hemingway: His Life In His Work Essay, Research Paper

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, This is to

tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemingway, who lives in Paris (an

American)… I d look him up right away. He s the real thing. This is perhaps the most

prophetic statement Fitzgerald ever made in his lifetime, because Ernest Hemingway was

indeed the real thing . Only months after that letter was written, Hemingway s first book

of short stories, In Our Time, was published, and so began the career of one of America s

greatest literary heroes. The works that followed stunned audiences around the world

with the clear, concise language that was used, and the elaborate details that allowed

millions of people an in depth look into the life of an amazingly interesting man.

However, the perfection achieved in his literature was always out of reach to the man

himself. But Hemingway was able to use his real life tragedies and make them into

timeless masterpieces. That is why to this day it can be said that Ernest Hemingway is

the most influential American writer of all time (Turnbull, 167).

Born in Oak Park, Illinois on July 21, 1899, Hemingway was raised to appreciate

the beauty of nature and the importance of spending time in the wilderness. This love of

the outdoors, including fishing and hunting, becomes quite apparent in his later pieces of

literature. At the age of eighteen, Hemingway was stationed in Italy, during World War I,

as a Red Cross ambulance driver. It was there that he first fell in love with Europe. He

was immediately attracted to the beauty of the countryside and the elegance of the

cultures there, and would later spend many years of his life on the continent. Herman

Melville called the sea his Harvard and Yale , to Ernest Hemingway, the continent of

Europe was his (Baker, 17).

Not long after his arrival, Hemingway was wounded by an Austrian shell as it

exploded nearby killing an Italian soldier, and blowing the legs off of another. The

details that followed have been disputed, but one source states that Hemingway, with

shrapnel embedded in his leg, carried two wounded soldiers to safety as machine gun fire

ripped through his already bloodied limb. It was at the hospital in Milan, while having

his leg tended to, where Hemingway first fell in love. She was a Red Cross nurse more

than nine years his senior, but he loved her with all the passion that would become his

trademark. But he soon had to return to the states, and the affair was over (Nelson, 31).

His war experiences would prove to be very useful in the years to come. When he

returned to Illinois, he would give speeches at the public library recounting his adventures

in Italy. At one of these lectures, one of the women in the audience was so taken by the

young man s diction, she asked her husband, who was the editor of the Toronto Star, to

give him a job. Hemingway wrote for the paper, and soon asked to be a foreign

correspondent, so that he could move to Paris and begin his writing career (Baker, 28).

Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1923, and became part of a circle of writers which

included Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It wasn t long

before In Our Time was ready to be published, and with the help of his new friends the

book was being sold in Europe and America in no time. In Our Time is a collection of

short stories that seemed to chronicle Hemingway s life up to that point. This particular

book shows his unwillingness to expose any kind of weakness in his characters, because

his characters are almost always composites of himself, however the writing is some of

his finest (Nelson, 49).

After the publication of In Our Time, Ernest had the most productive years of his

life. From 1925 to 1928, Hemingway would pump out novel after novel gaining him a

reputation world wide as one of the greatest authors of the day. It was in this period that

such works as The Sun Also Rises, The Torrents of Spring, and A Farewell to Arms were

produced. Hemingway took the literary world by storm from his little apartment in Paris

(Loscalzo, 19).

However the days of his invincibility would soon end. Hemingway s marriage to

Hadley Richardson was failing by the end of 1928, and they were considering divorce

when Earnest learned of his father s death. Clearance Hemingway had shot himself in the

head (Nelson, 66).

Returning to the states gave Hemingway a new outlook on life, he soon moved to

Key West, Florida and took a new wife. Meanwhile, his status had risen to super

stardom. Throughout the world imitators attempted to recreate the simplicity of his short

stories (a pattern that continues to this day), and it wasn t uncommon to see his face on

the cover of several magazines. Ernest Hemingway, or Papa as he was now being

referred to, had infiltrated pop culture. In Key West, A Death in the Af

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