Ernest Hemingway

“Grace Under Pressure” Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois • “A place of wide lawns and narrow minds”

He spent his summers on a lake in upper Michigan

When he was 25 years old, he went to World War One in Italy and served in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps • One night in July 1918 he was hit by a trench mortar shell. • 228 pieces of shrapnel hit his body.

He recuperated in a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with his nurse. She was the inspiration for Catherine Barkley

Unhappy back home, he went to Paris where he worked as a reporter and freelance writer. • Here he honed his literary skills and was part of a group of artists called “The Lost Generation”

His terse, straightforward style influenced every succeeding generation of writers. • He called this writing on the “principle of the iceberg”

“For every one-eighth of it that you see above water, there is seven-eighths of it submerged.”

He became famous overnight with the novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), about the lost generation. • He followed that up with A Farewell to Arms (1929), also a bestseller.

By 1930 his public image was world famous. • He became fascinated by bullfighting in Spain and published a nonfiction book about it, Death in the Afternoon. • He also became interested in big-game hunting, and went on safaris in Africa. • He wrote a book about that too, called Green Hills of Africa. • Ironically, he was sick much of his life had bad eyesight, and was accident-prone

In the 1940s he was in two separate plane crashes in Africa. In the second one, newspaper headlines reported he had died.

After writing nonfiction in the 1930s, he returned to fiction with For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940. • Hemingway sympathized with, and fought with, the left-leaning Republicans against the fascist regime. • Citadel graduate Jim Rigney (aka “Robert Jordan”) took his pen name from this character. • He called Spain “the country I love the most” and returned there frequently

He was larger than life, and hard to live with. • He was married 4 times, and each time he valued work more than family. • He would tolerate no wife who tried to overshadow him. • He had 3 sons, one of whom is still living.

He wrote his most famous books in Key West and Cuba. • Both houses there are now museums. • He loved being on the water and sport fishing. He competed in fishing and boxing tournaments.

During World War II, he reported on the Normandy invasion from inside the amphibious landing craft. • He marched into Paris on the day it was liberated, and “took command” of the bar at the Ritz Hotel

In Cuba he had a yacht, the Pilar, captained by a fisherman named Gregorio Fuentes. • In the 1950s, critics thought Hemingway was finished, but Fuentes inspired him to write The Old Man and the Sea. • When it first appeared in Life magazine, the story sold out the entire issue.

Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. • Throughout his life had suffered from undiagnosed bipolar syndrome. • This was probably brought on by trauma from his war wound. • He grew depressed, and had to undergo electroshock therapy.

Instead of helping him, this made his condition even worse. • Clinically depressed, he committed suicide in 1961. • After he died, five more books he had completed but not published, were brought out.

He created a new style of writing that predominates today. • He regarded writing as a noble calling, almost religious in nature. • He was dedicated to his craft, and he worked hard at it. • He hated phonies, always lived among “ordinary” people, and thought the literary world was stuffy and artificial.

He created a new kind of hero, who lives by a code. • He thought the greatest virtue in one’s life was living with “grace under pressure.” • That philosophy defines Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms.

Ernest Hemingway