Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway
By Aaron Schwartz

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Chicago in the house of his grand father. There were six children in his family and he was the second among them. He had a rather nice life on the shore of Bear Lake, where he caught his first fish being only three years old. At this age he was described so by his mother: “...He counts up to 100, can spell by ear very well. He likes to build cannons and forts with building blocks. He collects cartoons of the Russo-Japanese War. He loves stories about Great Americans - can give you good sketches of all the great men of American History”. (Unger, Leonard (Ed.). American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974. pp. 2-17) All children in this family were taught music and were taken to concerts and art galleries. From his father Ernest inherited love to nature and skills to build fire or to cook. He was taught to be physically and morally strong. He knew how to handle guns and his first shotgun he got when he was ten. He killed himself with the gun fifty one years later. He was a rather strong man with strong principles, he believed that “life was a tragedy and it could have only one end” (Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton University Press, 1952 pp.10-12).

After graduating from the High School he worked as a reporter for Kansas City Star. During World War| he was an ambulance driver. The love affair between an ambulance driver and a nurse is described in his work A Farewell to Arms. During the Spanish Civil War he worked as a correspondent on the loyalist side. As a reflection of his experience in this war appeared his great novel (1940).

From the very childhood he liked to invent stories with dramatic events and with courageous heroes. He was used to do all the things properly and to be afraid of nothing. When he studied at The Oak Park and River Township High School he was interested only in learning English, other subjects were boring for him and he was writing articles for the school newspaper. Being in his twenties Hemingway became famous, when he wrote The Sun Also Rises – a novel about American emigrants. The notion “Lost Generation” was used to name the people of the times after the First World War and about these people was Hemingway writing in this novel. His works were often compared with works of his contemporaries William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But Hemingway’s works have simpler structures and are written in a style of short and concrete prose, his works are considered to reflect “rugged individualism of the American spirit in action”. He is rather direct and also quite subtle.