Author's Style

          Hemingway would write about the economy, and he had an important influence on the development of 20th century writing. Hemingway also used understatement in his writing, this helped with the humor of the story. The protagonist in Hemingway's novels were typically stoical men who can still have "grace under pressure."

          Hemingway used the Iceberg Theory, which is "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."  For example in "Hills Like White Elephants" he never mentions the word abortion, but that is what the characters of the story are talking about.

Background on Hemingway

          Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois.  His parents were Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway. He was the second of six children and attended Oak Park High School, where he edited the school newspaper (the Trapeze) and contributed pieces to the school's literary magazine (the Tabula).  His career as a writer started at 17 in Kansas City in a newspaper office.  During WWI he volunteered in an ambulance unit in the Italian army.  He was wounded and spent lots of time in hospitals, and was recognized by the Italian army.  When he returned to the United States he was a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers.  Then he was sent back to Europe to cover the Greek Evolution.  

          On September 3, 1921 he married Elizabeth Hadley Richardson and they entered the literary community in Paris while living off of Richardson's trust fund and Hemingway's pay from the Toronto Star for being a foreign correspondent.  In 1927 the two divorced and Hemingway ended up marrying Pauline Pfeiffer on May 10, 1927.  Hemingway and Pfeiffer lived in Key West, Florida for most of their life. December 6, 1928 was an emotional day as Hemingway's father shot himself because of concern for his financial future and he was also suffering from severe diabetes.  One month after For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway married Martha Ellis Gellhorn who was a fellow writer and war correspondent.  This marriage only lasted five years. He then married his fourth and final wife Mary Welsh Monks on March 14, 1946.  They lived in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba for the next fourteen years. 

          Hemingway's first important work was entitled The Sun Also Rises (1926) which was written in 1926.  This piece talked about his experience as a member of the expatriate Americans in Paris.  Some of his other works include A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man And The Sea (1952), Men Without Women (1927), and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938) and many others.  

          A Farewell to Arms was the study of an American ambulance officer's life in the war and his role as a deserter. For Whom the Bell Tolls (his most ambitious novel) was based on his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain.  The most outstanding short novel The Old Man and the Sea was the story of an old fisherman's long and lonely journey at sea.  

          Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for his work The Old Man and the Sea. He was unable to attend the prize ceremonies because he was "unnerved" from the two plane crashes earlier that year. He died in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961 from a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. He was found by his wife who gave news of his death to the world.  He died just two and a half weeks before his sixty-second birthday.  He left behind three sons and millions of fans and readers who would preserve his memory.

Introduction

This blog has been started for my 12th grade AP english class as an assignment. In this blog i will be talking about the author Ernest Hemingway. So feel free to read my entries and give feedback if you would like.