Title: Ernest Hemingway
1Ernest Hemingway
2Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 July 2,
1961) was an American novelist, short-story
writer, and journalist. He was part of the 1920s
expatriate community in Paris known as "the Lost
Generation", as described in his memoir A
Moveable Feast.
Ernest Hemingway, c. 1900
3First novels and other early works
- After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park.
Driven from the United States in part due to
prohibitioncitation needed, in 1920, he moved
to an apartment on 1599 Bathurst Street, now
known as The Hemingway, in the Humewood-Cedarvale
neighborhood in Toronto, Ontario.6 During his
stay, he found a job with the Toronto Star
newspper. He worked as a freelancer, staff
writer, and foreign correspondent. Hemingway
befriended fellow Star reporter Morley Callaghan.
Callaghan had begun writing short stories at this
time he showed them to Hemingway, who praised
them as fine work. They would later be reunited
in Paris.
4The Forty-Nine Stories
In 1938 along with his only full-length play,
titled The Fifth Column 49 stories were
published in the collection The Fifth Column and
the First Forty-Nine Stories. Hemingway's
intention was, as he openly stated in his
foreword, to write more. Many of the stories that
make up this collection can be found in other
abridged collections, including In Our Time, Men
Without Women, Winner Take Nothing, and The Snows
of Kilimanjaro. Some of the collection's
important stories include Old Man at the Bridge,
On The Quai at Smyrna, Hills Like White
Elephants, One Reader Writes, The Killers and
(perhaps most famously) A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place. While these stories are rather short, the
book also includes much longer stories, among
them The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy
Life of Francis Macomber.
5For Whom the Bell Tolls
6Francisco Franco and the Nationalists defeated
the Republicans, ending the Spanish Civil War in
the spring of 1939. Hemingway lost an adopted
homeland to Franco's fascists, and would later
lose his beloved Key West, Florida home due to
his 1940 divorce. A few weeks after the divorce,
Hemingway married his companion of four years in
Spain, Martha Gellhorn, his third wife. His novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940. It
was written in 1939 in Cuba and Key West, and was
finished in July, 1940. The long work, which
takes place during the Spanish Civil War, was
based on real events and tells of an American
named Robert Jordan fighting with Spanish
soldiers on the Republican side. It was largely
based upon Hemingway's experience of living in
Spain and reporting on the war. It is one of his
most notable literary accomplishments. The title
is taken from the penultimate paragraph of John
7For Whom the Bell Tolls
8Later years
- One section of the sea trilogy was published as
The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. That novella's
enormous success satisfied and fulfilled
Hemingway. It earned him the Pulitzer Prize in
1953. The next year he was awarded with the Nobel
Prize in Literature. Upon receiving the latter he
noted that he would have been "happy
happier...if the prize had been given to that
beautiful writer Isak Dinesen", referring to
Danish writer Karen Blixen.16 These awards
helped to restore his international reputation.
The Old Man and the Sea
9Bartender at the famous in Havana. Hanging on
the bar is a plate with a likeness of Ernest
Hemingway and a framed, signed message written by
him. He was a regular patron.
Aboard his yacht, the Pilar, ca. mid 1950s
10Suicide
- Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of
1961, and received ECT treatment again. Some
three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, he took
his own life on the morning of July 2, 1961 at
his home in Ketchum, Idaho, with a shotgun blast
to the head. Judged not me ntally responsible for
his final act, he was buried in a Roman Catholic
service. Hemingway himself blamed the ECT
treatments for "putting him out of business" by
destroying his memory some medical and scholarly
opinion has been receptive to this view, although
others, including one of the physicians who
prescribed the electroshock regimen, dispute that
opinion
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