Tribute to Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was an American Pulitzer and Nobel
Prize-winning author born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. “Papa,” as he was called,
was a lean, mean writing machine, and by "lean" I'm not referring to his body mass index. Sparse, direct, simple, unadorned, almost
stingy are words sometimes used to describe his prose. You won’t find his work
dripping with over-flowery sentences. Perhaps he saved those fluffy words for the
women by his side—and he did have a number of them.
During the 1920s Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley
Richardson, lived in Paris. This is where he met and was energized by other
expats such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra
Pound. (The Paris Wife by Paula McClain
is an interesting historical novel about their years in Paris as told by his
wife Hadley’s point of view.) Hadley was also with him when he first traveled
to Spain during the Pamplona Festival and became captivated with bullfighting
which led to his book The Sun Also Rises.
His second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, and Ernest divided their
time between Key West, Florida and Wyoming.
She accompanied him on the first African safari in the 1930s, which
motivated him to write the short stories The
Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, and his
non-fiction memoir, Green Hills of Africa.
In 1937, he began a relationship with his future (third)
wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn while he was covering the Spanish Civil War
for a newspaper. For Whom the Bell Tolls, published
in 1939, was a result of his exposure
to the Spanish battlefields.
WWII brought Hemingway to Europe as a war correspondent and
it was there where he found love yet again with his fourth and final wife, Mary
Welsh, a journalist for Time
magazine. Her marriage to Ernest spanned fifteen years. In 1953 he received a
Pulitzer Prize for his novella, The Old Man and the Sea, a story that takes place in Cuba where he was a
resident from 1942-45. A year later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature. Tragically, Mary was the one who discovered Hemingway’s body at his
Ketchum, Idaho home when he committed suicide in 1961 by a self-inflicted
gunshot wound. He was sixty-one years old. This was not the only suicide in his
family; his sister Ursula, father Clarence, brother Leicester, and
granddaughter Margaux all ended their own lives. While “Papa’s” heartrending
passing was greatly mourned, his celebrated works live on year after year.
My husband enjoyed A Farewell to Arms better than I did, but I LOVED The Old Man and the Sea. Click on the links to read the reviews.
Hemingway’s works include:
Three Stories and Ten
Poems, 1923
In Our Time 1925 –
Short Story Collection
The Sun Also Rises,
1926
Torrents of Spring,
1926
Men Without Women,
1927
A Farewell to Arms,
1929
Death in the Afternoon,
1932 – About bullfighting
Winner Take Nothing, 1933
The Green Hills of
Africa, 1935 – Non-fiction account of big-game hunting in Africa
The Short Happy Life
of Francis Macomber, published in Cosmopolitan
Magazine in 1936
The Snows in
Kilimanjaro, published in Cosmopolitan
Magazine in 1936
To Have and to Have
Not, 1937
The Fifth Column and
the First Forty-Nine Stories, 1938
For Whom the Bell
Tolls, 1940
Across the River and
Into the Trees, 1950
The Old Man and the Sea, 1952 – Pulitzer Prize in 1953
A Moveable Feast,
Memoir published posthumously in 1964
Islands in the Stream,
published posthumously in 1970
The Nick and Adams
Stories, published posthumously in 1972
Dangerous Summer,
published posthumously in 1985
The Garden of Eden,
published posthumously in 1986
At First True Light,
published posthumously in 1999
Happy Reading!
Annette
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