Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. His father was a doctor, his mother an aspiring singer; he grew up hunting and fishing in northern Michigan, which gave him the outdoors material that runs through his early work. After high school he went not to college but to the Kansas City Star, where he learned to write short declarative sentences under a style guide that told reporters to avoid adjectives. At eighteen he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, was wounded by mortar fire, and fell in love with the nurse who attended him — an experience he transformed into A Farewell to Arms (1929). Both the wound and the nurse became legend before he was twenty.

He moved to Paris in 1921 as a foreign correspondent, fell in with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and began writing the stories collected in In Our Time (1925). The Sun Also Rises (1926), his first major novel, introduced his voice to a wide audience: Jake Barnes, a war-wounded journalist, and his circle of expatriates drinking and traveling and failing to connect across Spain and France. The novel defined the Lost Generation's self-image. A Farewell to Arms followed, then Death in the Afternoon (1932), a book about bullfighting that is also a book about courage and craft, and Green Hills of Africa (1935). For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War in which Hemingway had served as a correspondent, was his most commercially successful novel at the time of publication.

The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a novella about an aging Cuban fisherman's battle with a giant marlin, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and contributed to his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. The Nobel citation specifically mentioned this book and his "forceful and style-making mastery of the art of modern narration."

His prose theory — the iceberg theory, or theory of omission — holds that the dignity of a story's movement comes from what is left out: the writer's knowledge of what is omitted strengthens the writing even when those things go unstated. His journalism training and his insistence on writing only from direct experience shaped the most imitated prose style of the 20th century: short sentences, plain nouns and verbs, repetition that builds rhythm rather than clumsiness, dialogue stripped of attribution and adverb. The style is far more difficult to execute than it appears, which is why most imitations fail.

His later life was marked by multiple serious accidents, illnesses, and progressive mental deterioration. He received electroconvulsive therapy at the Mayo Clinic — treatments that, he complained, destroyed his memory and his ability to write. He died by suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, in July 1961.

The criticism of Hemingway that has grown most substantially since his death concerns gender. His machismo — the cult of bull-fighting, big-game hunting, war, deep-sea fishing, the code of masculine stoicism — has been subjected to sustained feminist analysis. His female characters are often passive, idealized, or both, and the biographical record of his relationships with women is not reassuring. Scholars including Hilary Justice and critics following Judith Fetterley have argued convincingly that the heroic code his fiction promotes is constructed against femininity. These critiques are legitimate. They do not explain away the prose, which operates at a level of compression and rhythm that most fiction never reaches. His technique is admired across ideological lines because technique at that level is genuinely hard to dismiss.