Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born
in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a
newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After
the United States entered the First World War, he joined a
volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the
front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government,
and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the
United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American
newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events
as the Greek Revolution.
During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of
expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first
important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally
successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an
American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his
role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter
during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most
ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his
later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old
Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's
journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea,
and his victory in defeat.
Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray
soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive
people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways
of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and
faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his
predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his
short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without
Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine
Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
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