Life and Legacy of Ernest Hemingway

This July marks the 110th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's birthday. The Nobel Prize winning author had a significant influence on twentieth-century fiction, and most of his works are considered classics today. His work is best known for his stark, minimalist style and accessibility to readers. Authors James Joyce and J.D. Salinger acknowledged Hemingway's influence on their own writing. His works also paved the way for potboilers and pulp fiction. His life and legacy are still celebrated today.

On the morning of July 21st, 1899, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. The life he would live is as fascinating as any of the stories he has created. Perhaps the reason is Hemingway was his characters, and often the line between fact and fiction was blurred.

Ernest Hemingway began writing at an early age. His papers were often read aloud in class as writing examples his classmates should strive for. His short stories were published in the school literary magazine, and he wrote regular pieces for the school newspaper which he edited as well. But writing had not been his first love. At fifteen, the would-be writer and Nobel prize winner aspired to a life of adventure. He had learned to hunt and fish at an early age--past times that would also become important in his later life and fiction. Around the age of sixteen his aspirations leaned toward writing. His early stories about adventure, hunting, and boxing, shaped the fiction for which he would be famous for later.

In 1917 the fall after Hemingway graduated Oak Park High School, World War I was raging. He tried to enlist in the army but was rejected because of bad vision. From there he went to Kansas City to live with his Uncle Tyler, and he became a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star covering accidents, mob strikes, and drug raids. The Star's style manual instructed, "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English not forgetting to strive for smoothness." These stylistic rules shaped his fiction.

Seven months later Hemingway left the paper to become an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Europe. Only a few weeks later, while distributing chocolate to Italian soldiers, he was seriously wounded, first by shell fragments, then by machine gun fire as he carried another soldier to safety. He became a decorated war hero. The months he spent recuperating in the hospital became the basis of what he called his favorite and best novel, A Farewell to Arms. While there nineteen-year-old Hemingway fell in love with a twenty-seven year old nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. She rejected his marriage proposals, saying he was too young and immature for her. A few months after he returned home to Oak Park, she wrote him to announce her engagement to an Italian officer.

A heartbroken Hemingway channeled his disappointment into his writing. He decided then that writing would be the most important and reliable element of his life. Friends and lovers would come and go, but he would always have his writing. Hemingway's personal experiences would be used in his fiction. If actual events worked, he would stick closely to what happened. If not, he would invent whatever he needed to make a story work. He used himself as a character as well as his friends. And likely his borrowing from real life is what cost him his friendships. Friend Harold Loeb was the basis of the Robert Cohn character in The Sun Also Rises. Thirty-five years after its publication, he was still smarting over the way Hemingway portrayed him. In his 1936 short story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Hemingway used a conversation he had with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald said, "The rich are different from you and me." Hemingway transcribed the quote accurately, but in a 1936 interview with Esquire magazine, Fitzgerald claimed the rest of the anecdote had been false.

Although the friendship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway was a volatile one, it was one of mutual respect. In the beginning, Fitzgerald, the wealthy successful writer was Hemingway's mentor and hardest critic. He was influential in Hemingway's rewriting the ending to A Farewell to Arms. Six months and thirty-nine drafts later, Hemingway came up with the understated final line of A Farewell to Arms, "After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." When Hemingway became the more successful author of the two, the roles reversed, and he became the mentor.

Thirty years after his first stay in Paris, Hemingway dug out his Paris sketches and wrote A Moveable Feast , which was published posthumously in 1964. Although published as a straight reminiscence, the ending passage of the Preface reads, "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." Working drafts located in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy library show an unpublished draft of this passage in which he wrote, "No one can write true facts as reminiscence."

One story that was not based on personal experience but has often been speculated as such is The Old Man and the Sea. In 1936 he originally heard the story about an old Cuban fisherman who struggles with a fish for days only to lose it to sharks, but Hemingway did not write it until 1951. Readers analyzed the story for metaphors and symbolism, but Hemingway rebuffed the theories. He told his editor Wallace Meyer at Scribners, "an epilogue to all my writing and what I have learned, or tried to learn, while writing and trying to live. It will destroy the school of criticism that claims I can write about nothing except myself and my own experiences."

Except for the posthumous fictional memoirs, A Moveable Feast and True at First Light, Hemingway would not publish a big book again. What propelled him to attain literary success was also what lead him to despair and loneliness. In a draft of his 1954 Nobel acceptance speech he wrote, "There is no lonelier man than the writer when he is writing except the suicide. Nor is there any happier, nor more exhausted man when he has written well. If he has written well everything that is him has gone into the writing and he faces another morning when he must do it again. There is always another morning and another morning." But after July 2, 1961, there would be no more mornings. After struggling for years with diabetes, hypertension, and severe depression, Ernest Hemingway put a gun to his head and ended his life.

Sources:

A Farewell to Arms. (New York: Scribners 1929)

A Moveable Feast. (New York: Scribners 1964)

Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship, Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers 1994)

Esquire, 6 (August 1936) 27, 194-201.

Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Carlos Baker (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1969)