This presentation covers the life of American author Ernest Hemingway, who
lived from 1899 to 1961.
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois,
a suburb of Chicago. His father was a wealthy physician
and passed on to his son his love for hunting and fishing.
After graduating high school in 1917,
Ernest Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star,
and since he was rejected from
army service for poor vision, Hemingway volunteered as an American ambulance
driver in France during
World War I. He transferred to the Italian front
where he became the first wounded American to survive after being hit with
a mortar shell.
He was decorated for valor which he believed he did not deserve.
After his recovery, he returned home taking a job with the Toronto Star
working as a foreign correspondent covering the Greco-Turkish
War. He then returned to Paris,
which after World War I became a city full of intellectual life,
creativity, and genius.
In Paris Hemingway wrote along with Gertrude Stein,
Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, and he helped contribute to a
revolution in literary style and language
with his succinct reportorial prose based on deceptively simple sentence
structure,
which used a restricted vocabulary, precise
imagery, and impersonal dramatic tone.
He published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems,
while in Paris in 1923. Three years later he published his novel The Sun Also
Rises,
making him the spokesman for the men and women Gertrude Stein had named "a
lost generation."
Hemingway's work has been read as a negative commentary
on the modern world, filled with sterility,
failure, and death; however, his nihilistic vision is modified by his
affirmative
assertions of the possibility living with style and courage.
His primary concern was an individual's "moment of truth"
(which he derived from bull fighting), and he was fascinated by the threat of physical,
emotional,
or psychic death, a fascination reflected in his lifelong preoccupation
with stories of war and death shown in his novels A Farewell to Arms,
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Death in the Afternoon,
and Green Hills of Africa. Hemingway felt a person's greatest achievement
is to show "grace under pressure," or what he describes in The Sun Also Rises
as "maintaining the purity of line through the maximum
of exposure." Hemingway rejected the romantic ideal
of the union of lovers and suggested instead
that all relationships must end in destruction and death.
He shows a farewell to both love and war
in his novel A Farewell to Arms.
In 1937 Hemingway became a foreign correspondent covering the Spanish Civil
War
and three years later published his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls
based on his experience. This novel is set in Spain during the Civil War
and uses his popular theme love found and lost
and also describes the unshakable spirit the common person.
He wrote another novel with a similar theme in 1952,
The Old Man and the Sea, about an old fisherman name Santiago,
who is triumphant even in the face of defeat.
Two years later, in 1954, Hemingway won the prestigious Nobel Prize for
Literature
for his contributions to modern narration.
Hemingway's fame brought him critical scrutiny
throughout the world. Numerous parallels between his life and his characters
exist but none as pronounced as that of Richard Cantwell
in this novel Across the River and into the Trees,
whose attempts at stoic control
of physical and mental illness foreshadow the struggles and defeat
of Hemingway's final years, which sadly ended
when he, just as his father had thirty years earlier,
committed suicide on July 2nd, 1961.
The information for this PowerPoint is from
the Anthology of American Literature, Volume II, 10th edition, and
all images are taken from Google Images.