Ernest Hemingway 3 Essay, Research Paper

Ernest Hemingway was a major American novelist and short story writer whose principal themes were violence, machismo, and the nature of what is called now male bonding. His renowned style for his firmly non-intellectual

fiction is characterized by understatement and terse dialogue (Riley 231). Hemingway had a life that included him running away several times. Hemingway had many jobs before becoming a novelist and short story writer. He also had many influences, from his father s suicide to painters that influenced his writings. Ernest Hemingway, an American novelist and short story writer, whose style is characterized by crispness, childish dialogue and emotional understatement that has made him a major novelist and short story writer (Riley 231).

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois on July, 21 1899 to his mother Grace Hall and his father Clarence Edmonds Hemingway (Rood 187). Even though he was born into a upper-middle class family, he single handedly revised the Byronic stereotype of the artist-adventurer (Lesniak 20). Hemingway s childhood was rarely mentioned, other then that he tried to run away from

home several times when he was still in high school (Lesniak 23). After Hemingway graduated from Oak Park High School, he went to work, in 1917, as a reporter at the Kansas City Star. In 1918 he enlisted as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy. In 1920 he starts working as a reporter and

a foreign correspondent for Toronto. After being an ambulance driver in Italy in World War I, he converted to Catholicism and he often referred to himself for the rest of his life as a rotten Catholic (Lesnaik 20). Hemingway

married four times during his life, each time to a Midwestern American girl. First he married Hadley Richardson on September 3, 1921. On May 10, 1927 he married Pauline Pfeiffer. On November 21, 1940 he married Martha Gellhorn.

Finally on March 14, 1946 he married Mary Walsh. He regarded the end of a marriage as a personal defeat (Rood 187).

Hemingway had many kinds of figures. He was a craftsman dedicated to the art of letters who rarely wavered in his adherence to the highest standards of artistic probity. He also significantly influenced twentieth century writing on all levels through his pronouncements and the principles of professionalism which he introduced and lived. Hemingway was also a night-club roisterer, a slick and chromatically unreal advertisement in the rotogravures, unfairly good

copy for the gossip columnists, public brawler and braggart, and the batter d. wreck d old man who appeared to Seymour Betsky and Leslie Fielder as an unsure schoolboy, desperately uncertain and frail (Lesniak 19).

Hemingway was awarded many awards, they included the Pulitzer prize for his novel The Old Man and the Sea in 1953, the Noble Prize in 1954 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit in 1954 (Rood 187). On July 2, 1961, Hemingway was found dead with self inflicted wounds at his home in Ketchum, Idaho (Rood 188). A great lose for all literature lovers and admirers.

Hemingway had many kinds of writing style, from his style compared to Cezanne painting style to that of his style having short and simple sentences. Sheldon Norman described these characteristics of Hemingway s writing

style: first, short and simple sentence structure, with heavy use of parallelism, which convey the effect of control, terseness, and blunt honesty; second, purged diction which above all eschews the use of bookish, latinate, or abstract words and thus achieves the effect of being heard or spoken or transcribed from reality rather then appearing as a contract of the imagination; and third, skillful use of repetition and a kind of verbal counterpoint, which operate either by pairing or juxtaposing opposites, or else by running the same word or phrase through a series of shifting meanings and inflections

(Lesniak 192).

Ernest believed that if he could see himself clear and whole, his vision might be useful to others who also lived in his world. However, in order to project those metaphors cleanly, he had to subject the total techniques of his writings to the natural rhythms of his own personality (Rovit 165). Hemingway loved to play with words, toy with them, make puns and savor sounds, juggle a rhyme or utter a snappy piece of slang. Words came alive for him not just on the pages of books, but also in his conversations. He tried to find new and original ways of saying things. English is the one subject that never was difficult for him (Ferrell 35). Hemingway decided that he would write one story about each thing he knew about. He was doing this all the time he

was writing and it was and severe discipline he said (Lesniak 192).

People compare his writing style to that of Cezanne s painting style. A Cezanne like simplicity of scene is built up with the touches of a master and the great effects are achieved with a sublime economy. At these moments, style and substance are of one piece, each growing from the other, and one cannot imagine that life could exist except as describe (Lesniak 193) Hemingway s work is still too fresh and close to people to be snugly categorized in literary history, but people think that they have demonstrated a configuration of

very probable shapes and designs which future Hemingway s criticism and scholarship is likely to extend, refurbish, and correct (Rovit 163).

Hemingway like to use metaphors in his writings. Typically he will use the metaphors of games, sports, bullfights, and wars to describe his views on life. Baseball, football, horseracing, hunting and fishing provided him with his consistent metaphors for expression (Lesniak 31,32). The metaphor of violent games provided Hemingway with a structure in which he could cast his

aesthetic – present again and again, his portraits of the artist, as a hunter, fisherman, matador, soldier, prizefighter, and gambler (Lesniak 32).

Hemingway had many influences and things that influenced him. Some of Hemingway s literary influences included Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein (Lesniak 192). But he took some of Stein s

style and used it in his writings. He took what was a colloquial – in appearance – American style, full of repeated words, prepositional phrases and present participles, in which he wrote his early published stories

in this style (Lesniak 192).

When learning about his father s suicide, Hemingway was influenced more. While he was writing the second draft of A Farewell to Arms, he learned of his father s suicide. This fact would influence the interior drama of his fiction. It is pointed out after the publication of A Farewell to Arms,

Hemingway s fictional output noticeably slows down (Lesniak 70). The volume is also noticeable for its savage concern with homosexuality and castration, and it is surely remarkable that none of the stories has a love interest.

(Lesniak 70).

In conclusion, Hemingway was a major novelist and short story writer of his time. By having the influences, like his father s suicide, painters and violence. His writing approaches were his ways of approaching his identity of

discovering himself in the projected metaphors of his experiences (Lesniak 165).