ERNEST HEMINGWAY
LIFE AND WORKS
He was born in Illinois in 1899.
His father was a wealthy doctor but later he committed suicide. His mother was a music teacher.
Childhood: very active, he went fishing and hunting, he played rugby and he boxed (all tough games).
1917: reporter for Kansas City Star, he started to learn the rules of “pure obljective writing”
characterised by declarative sentences without any unecessary words or clichés.
During World War I: He was an Ambulance driver in the Red Cross (1918). On his jouney in Italy he
stopped in Paris, wich was under constant bombardment by Germany. Hemingway tried to gets close
to combat as possible and he was wounded in Italy. He recieved a medal for dragging a wounded
Italian soldier in spite of his own injuries. When he returned home he was celebrated as a war hero.
1922: he came back in USA and he got a job as a foreign correspondent so he was sent to Paris
where he joined a gruop of expatriate wrtiters called the Lost Generation.
1924: he published his firts collection of short stories In Our Time (childhood + alter ego Nick
Adams).
1926: The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) love for exotic settings and exterme situations where violent
antions reveal virtues like courage, comradeship and endurance.
1929: A Farewell To Arms a love story set among the orrors and the suffering of the World
War I.
1933: he went on an African huntig safari The Green Hills of Africa, the short story The Snows of
Kilimanjaro (1936).
Spanish Civil War: he was a war correspondent for an American news agency and this experience
was recordered in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) love and war against the realistic background
of the Spanish Civil War
He fought in World War II.
Post-war fictions: The Old Man and the Sea (1952) a story of one man’s courage that lead
Hemingway to win the 1953 Pulitzer Price in fiction / Across the River and into the Trees, Islands in
the Strem, The Garden Of Eden criticised.
1954: he was awarded the Nobel Price for Litterature
1961: he committed suicide. He suffered from hypertension, diabetes, acute depression, and he
feared his physical decline.
CHILDHOOD AND NATURE
Rarely Hemingway write in an explicit autobiographical way, but in his works he seems to go back to
the most important experiences of his life giving them a universal value the key experience was the
encounter with nature which came out of his passion for fishing and hunting.
These sports were seen as a struggle against nature in which man is rewarded for fighting with
skill and courage.
In this struggle life and death are the driving and misterious forces of existence. Live is a
codified set of actions which gives man the measure of his control over events but beyond these
actions there in nothingness and death.
