Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

Selected Bibliography

Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Fourth edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 1972.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. (Ed.). Ernest Hemingway's apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916-1917. NCR Microcard Editions: Washington, D.C., 1971.

Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Robert W. Trogdon (Eds.). The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence 1925-1947. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1996.

Clifford, Stephen P. Beyond the Heroic "I": Reading Lawrence, Hemingway, and "masculinity". Bucknell Univ. Press: Cranbury, NJ, 1999.

Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. Selected articles and dispatches of four decades. Edited by William White, with commentaries by Philip Young. Collins: London, 1968.

- Complete poems. Edited with an introduction and notes by Nicholas Gerogiannis. Rev. ed., University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1992.

- The Complete Short Stories. The Finca Vigнa ed. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1998.

- Death in the Afternoon. Jonathan Cape: London, 1932.

- Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1981.

- A Farewell to Arms. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1929.

- Fiesta. Jonathan Cape: London, 1927.

- For Whom the Bell Tolls. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York 1940.

- The Garden of Eden. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1986.

- Green Hills of Africa. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York 1935.

- In Our Time. Boni and Liveright: New York, 1925.

- Islands in the Stream. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1970.

- A Moveable Feast. Jonathan Cape: London, 1964.

- The Nick Adams Stories. Preface by Philip Young. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1972.

- The Old Man and the Sea. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1952.

- Selected Letters 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. Panther Books/Granada Publishing: London 1985(1981).