Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway, 1950 Ernest Hemingway, 1950
Born	July 21, 1899 Oak Park, Illinois
Died	July 2, 1961 Ketchum, Idaho
Occupation	Writer and journalist
Literary movement	The Lost Generation

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. His distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth century fiction. Hemingway's protagonists are typically stoics, often seen as projections of his own character—men who must show "grace under pressure." Many of his works are considered classics in the canon of American literature.

Hemingway, nicknamed "Papa," was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, as described in his memoir A Moveable Feast, and was known as part of "the Lost Generation," a name he popularized. He led a turbulent social life, was married four times, and allegedly had various romantic relationships during his lifetime. Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, although he said he would have been "happy–happier...if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen," referring to Danish writer Karen Blixen. In 1961, at age 61, he committed suicide, as his father did before him.

Early life and writing experience

A baby picture, c. 1900

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Hemingway was the first son and the second of six children born to Clarence Edmonds ("Doctor Ed") and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway's physician father attended to the birth of Ernest and subsequently blew a horn on his front porch, announcing to the neighbors that his wife had borne a baby boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by Ernest's widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, an English immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived with the family. Hemingway was his namesake.

Hemingway's mother had considerable singing talent and had once aspired to an opera career and earned money giving voice and music lessons. She was domineering and narrowly religious, mirroring the strict Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had "wide lawns and narrow minds." His mother had wanted to bear twins, and when this did not happen, she dressed young Ernest and his sister Marcelline (eighteen months his senior) in similar clothes and with similar hairstyles, maintaining the pretense of the two children being "twins." Grace Hemingway further feminized her son in his youth by calling him "Ernestine." (Though much is made of this by biographers — especially Kenneth S. Lynn — middle-class Victorian boys were often treated in this manner.)

While his mother hoped that her son would develop an interest in music, Hemingway adopted his father's outdoorsy interests of hunting and fishing in the woods and lakes of northern Michigan. The family owned a house called Windemere on Michigan's Walloon Lake and often spent summers vacationing there. These early experiences in close contact with nature would instill in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure and for living in areas of the world generally considered remote or isolated.

Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School where he excelled both academically and athletically. Hemingway boxed and played football, and displayed particular talent in English classes. His first writing experience was serving as editor for both Trapeze and Tabula, the school's newspaper and literary magazine, respectively.

After high school Hemingway did not pursue a college education. Instead, at age seventeen, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star (1917). Although he worked at the newspaper for only six months, throughout his lifetime he used the guidance from the Star's style guide as a foundation for his writing style: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

World War I

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A young Hemingway in his World War I uniform

Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months, and, against his father's wishes, tried to join the United States Army to see action in World War I. He supposedly failed the medical examination due to poor vision (there is no record of this), and instead joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps and left for Italy. En route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris, which was under constant bombardment from German artillery. Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Hemingway tried to get as close to combat as possible.

Soon after arriving on the Italian Front, he witnessed the brutalities of war; on his first day of duty, an ammunition factory near Milan suffered an explosion. Hemingway had to pick up the human remains, mostly women who worked there. This first, extremely cruel encounter with death left him shaken. The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror; for example, one of them, Eric Dorman-Smith, quoted to him a line from Part Two of Shakespeare's Henry IV: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death...and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next." (Hemingway, for his part, would conjure this very same Shakespearean line in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, one of his famous African short stories.) In another instance, a 50-year-old soldier, to whom Hemingway said, "You're troppo vecchio [too old] for this war, pop," replied, "I can die as well as any man."

At the Italian Front on 8 July 1918, Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, ending his career as an ambulance driver. The exact details of the attack are in dispute, but Hemingway was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell that left fragments in his legs, and by a burst of machine-gun fire. He was later awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian government for, whilst injured, dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety.

After this experience, Hemingway convalesced in a Milan hospital run by the American Red Cross, where there was very little to do for entertainment. Hemingway often drank heavily and read newspapers to pass the time. Here he met Sister Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, D.C., one of eighteen nurses attending groups of four patients each. Hemingway fell in love with Sister Agnes, who was more than six years older than him, but their relationship did not survive his return to the United States; instead of following Hemingway to the U.S. as originally planned, she became romantically involved with an Italian officer and this left an indelible mark on Hemingway's psyche. These events provided inspiration for and were fictionalized in one of Hemingway's early novels, A Farewell to Arms.

The (First) Forty Nine Stories

Several of Hemingway's most famous short stories were written in the period following the war; in 1938—along with his only full-length play, entitled The Fifth Column—49 such stories were published in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. Hemingway's intention was, as he openly stated in his own foreword to the collection, to write more. Many of the stories that make up this collection can be found in other abridged collections, including In Our Time, Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Some of the collection's important stories include Old Man at the Bridge, On The Quai at Smyrna, Hills Like White Elephants, One Reader Writes, The Killers and (perhaps most famously) A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. While these stories are rather short, the book also includes much longer stories. Among these the most famous are The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

Only one other story collection by Hemingway appeared during his lifetime, entitled Four Stories Of The Spanish Civil War; "The Denunciation" is the most notable story therein. The Nick Adams Stories appeared posthumously in 1972. What is now considered the definitive compilation of all of Hemingway's short stories is published as The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, first compiled and published in 1987.

Early critical interplay

Hemingway's early works sold well and were generally received favorably by critics. This success elicited some crude and pretentious behavior from Hemingway, even in these formative years of his career. For example, he began to tell F. Scott Fitzgerald how to write; he also claimed that the English novelist Ford Madox Ford was sexually impotent. Hemingway in turn was the subject of much criticism. The journal Bookman attacked him as a dirty writer. According to Fitzgerald, McAlmon, the publisher of his first non-commercial book, labeled Hemingway "a fag and a wife-beater" and claimed that Pauline was a lesbian (she is alleged to have had lesbian affairs after their divorce). Gertrude Stein criticized him in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, suggesting that he had derived his prose style from her own and from Sherwood Anderson's.

Max Eastman disparaged Hemingway harshly, asking him to "come out from behind that false hair on the chest" (these accusations led to a physical confrontation between the two in the offices of Scribners that Maxwell Perkins would witness and later describe in a letter to Scott Fitzgerald). Eastman would go on to write an essay entitled Bull in the Afternoon, a satire of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Another facet of Eastman's criticism consisted in the suggestion that Hemingway ought to give up his lonely, tight-lipped stoicism and write about contemporary social affairs. Hemingway did so for at least a short time; his article Who Murdered the Vets? for New Masses, a leftist magazine, and To Have and Have Not displayed a certain heightened social awareness.

Of criticism, Hemingway said, "You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love," in an interview in The Paris Review, with its founder, George Plimpton, in 1958.

Key West & the Spanish Civil War

Hemingway posing for a dust jacket photo by Lloyd Arnold for "For Whom The Bell Tolls," at the Sun Valley Lodge, Idaho, late 1939

Following the advice of John Dos Passos, Hemingway moved to Key West, Florida, where he established his first American home. From his old stone house—a wedding present from Pauline's uncle—Hemingway fished in the Dry Tortugas waters with his longtime friend Waldo Peirce, went to the famous bar Sloppy Joe's, and traveled occasionally to Spain, gathering material for Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing.

Death in the Afternoon, a book about bullfighting, was published in 1932. Hemingway had become a bullfighting aficionado after seeing the Pamplona fiesta of 1925, fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway extensively discussed the metaphysics of bullfighting: the ritualized, almost religious practice. In his writings on Spain he was influenced by the Spanish master Pío Baroja (when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he traveled to see Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him he thought Baroja deserved the prize more than he).

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Ernest Hemingway painted by Waldo Peirce for Time Magazine in 1937

A safari in the fall of 1933 led him to Mombasa, Nairobi, and Machakos in Kenya, moving on from there to Tanzania where he hunted in the Serengeti, around Lake Manyara and West and Southeast of the present-day Tarangire National Park. 1935 saw the publication of Green Hills of Africa, an account of his African safari. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were the fictionalized results of his African experiences.

In Spain reporting on the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Hemingway broke friendship with John Dos Passos because Dos Passos kept reporting despite warning on the atrocities, not only of the fascist Nationalists whom Hemingway disliked, but also of the elected, left-leaning Republicans whom Hemingway favored (The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles by Stephen Koch, published 2005 ISBN 1-58243-280-5) and The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh Thomas). In this circumstance Hemingway has been linked to reporter Herbert Matthews. Hemingway also began to question his Catholicism at this time, eventually leaving the church (though friends indicate that he had "funny ties" to Catholicism for the rest of his life). The story The Denunciation [1] seems autobiographical, thus suggesting that the author might have been an informant for the Republic as well as a weapons instructor (The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh Thomas).

Some health problems characterized this period of Hemingway's life: an anthrax infection, a cut eyeball, a gash in his forehead, grippe, toothache, hemorrhoids; kidney trouble from fishing in Spain, torn groin muscle, finger gashed to the bone in an accident with a punching ball, lacerations (to arms, legs, and face) from a ride on a runaway horse through a deep Wyoming forest, and a broken arm from a car accident.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Nationalists defeated the Republicans and the Spanish Civil War ended in the spring of 1939. Hemingway had lost an adopted homeland to Franco's fascist Nationalists, and would later lose his beloved Key West, Florida home due to his 1940 divorce. A few weeks after the divorce, Hemingway married his companion of four years in Spain, Martha Gellhorn, as his third wife. His novel For Whom The Bell Tolls was published in 1940; the long work, which takes place during the Spanish Civil War, was based on real events (The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh Thomas) and tells of an American named Robert Jordan fighting with Spanish guerrillas on the side of the Republicans. It is one of Hemingway's most notable literary accomplishments. The title is taken from the penultimate paragraph of John Donne's Meditation XVII.

World War II and its aftermath

The United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941, and for the first time in his life, Hemingway sought to take part in naval warfare.

Aboard the Pilar, now a Q-Ship, Hemingway's crew was charged with sinking German submarines threatening the shipping off the coasts of Cuba and the United States (Martha Gellhorn always viewed the sub-hunting as an excuse for Hemingway and his friends to get gas and booze for fishing). As the FBI took over Caribbean counter-espionage—J. Edgar Hoover was suspicious of Hemingway from the start, and would become more so later—Ernest went to Europe as a war correspondent for Collier's magazine.

Hemingway, who was a correspondent for Collier's Weekly, observed the D-Day landings from an LCVP (landing craft), although he was not allowed to go ashore. He later became angry that his wife, Martha Gellhorn--by then more a rival war correspondent than a wife--had managed to get ashore in the early hours of June 7th dressed as a nurse, after she had crossed the Atlantic to England in a ship loaded with explosives. Still later, at Villedieu-les-Poêles, he allegedly threw three grenades into a cellar where SS officers were hiding. Hemingway acted as an unofficial liaison officer at Château de Rambouillet, and afterwards formed his own partisan group which, in his telling, took part in the liberation of Paris. This claim has been challenged by many historians, who say the only thing Hemingway liberated was the Ritz Hotel Bar. Nevertheless, he was without question on the scene.

After the war, Hemingway started work on The Garden of Eden, which was never finished and would be published posthumously in much-abridged form in 1986. At one stage, he planned a major trilogy which was to comprise "The Sea When Young", "The Sea When Absent" and "The Sea in Being" (the latter eventually published in 1952 as The Old Man and the Sea). He spent time in a small town in Italy called Acciaroli (located apprx. 136km south of Naples), where he was often seen walking around town, bottle in hand. Acciaroli was predominately known as a fishing village, and it was here where Hemingway conceived of the idea for "The Old Man and the Sea." Hemingway became fascinated with Antonio Masarone, an old fisherman whose Italian nickname, "Mastracchio", translated as "Old Man." There was also a "Sea-Chase" story; three of these pieces were edited and stuck together as the posthumously-published novel Islands in the Stream (1970).

Newly divorced from Gellhorn after four years of contentious marriage, Hemingway married the war correspondent Mary Welsh, whom he had met overseas in 1944. Hemingway's first novel after For Whom the Bell Tolls was Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), set in post-World War II Venice. He derived the title from the last words of American Civil War Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Enamored of a young Italian girl (Adriana Ivancich) at the time, Across the River and Into the Trees is a romance between a war-weary Colonel Cantwell (based on his friend, then Colonel, Major General Charles T. Lanham) and the young Renata (clearly based on Adriana; "Renata" means "reborn" in Italian). The novel received largely bad reviews, many of which accused Hemingway of tastelessness, stylistic ineptitude, and sentimentality. Perhaps the last charge was the truest, and fit an emerging pattern: Hemingway was growing old. But 'Across the River' has its latter-day defenders nonetheless.

Later years

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Alfred Eisenstaedt's portrait of Hemingway, 1952

One section of the above-mentioned sea trilogy was published as The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. That novella's enormous success satisfied and fulfilled Hemingway. It earned him both the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and restored his international reputation.

Then, his legendary bad luck struck once again; on a safari he suffered injuries in two successive plane crashes. Hemingway's injuries were serious; he sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg, had a grave concussion, temporarily lost vision in his left eye (and the hearing in his left ear), had paralysis of the sphincter, a crushed vertebra, ruptured liver, spleen and kidney, and first degree burns on his face, arms, and leg. Some American newspapers mistakenly ran his obituary thinking he had been killed in the accidents [2].

As if this were not enough, he was badly injured one month later in a bushfire accident which left him with second degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. The pain left him in prolonged anguish, and he was unable to travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize.

A glimmer of hope came with the discovery of some of his old manuscripts from 1928 in the Ritz cellars, which were transformed into A Moveable Feast. Although some of his energy seemed to be restored, severe drinking problems kept him down. His blood pressure and cholesterol count were perilously high, he suffered from aortal inflammation, and his depression, aggravated by the drinking, was worsening.

He also lost his Finca Vigía, his estate outside Havana, Cuba that he had owned for over twenty years, and was forced to go into exile in Ketchum, Idaho, when the conflict in Cuba began to escalate. And so the final chapter began—with Hemingway under surveillance from the American government for his residence and activities in Cuba.

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Hemingway and Castro shake hands; 1960

On 26 February 1960, Ernest Hemingway was unable to get his bullfighting narrative The Dangerous Summer to the publishers. He therefore had his wife Mary summon his friend, Life Magazine bureau head Will Lang Jr., to leave Paris and come to Spain. Hemingway persuaded Lang to let him print the manuscript, along with a picture layout, before it came out in hardcover. Although not a word of it was on paper, the proposal was agreed upon. The first part of the story appeared in Life Magazine on September 5 1960, with the remaining installments being printed in successive issues.

Hemingway was upset by the photographs in his The Dangerous Summer article. He was receiving treatment in Ketchum, Idaho for high blood pressure and liver problems—and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression and his continued paranoia, although this may in fact have helped to precipitate his suicide, since he reportedly suffered significant memory loss as a result of the shock treatments. He also lost weight, his 6-foot (183 cm) frame appearing gaunt at 170 pounds (77 kg).

Death

Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received ECT treatment again; but, some three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, he took his own life on the morning of July 2, 1961 in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, with a shotgun blast to the head. Judged not mentally responsible for his action of suicide, he was buried in a Roman Catholic service. Hemingway himself blamed the ECT treatments for "putting him out of business" by destroying his memory; and medical and scholarly opinion has been respectfully attentive to this view.

Other members of Hemingway's immediate family also committed suicide, including his father, Clarence Hemingway, his siblings Ursula and Leicester, and later his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway. Some believe that certain members of Hemingway's paternal line had a genetic condition or hereditary disease known as haemochromatosis, in which an excess of iron concentration in the blood causes damage to the pancreas and also causes depression or instability in the cerebrum. Hemingway's physician father is known to have developed bronze diabetes owing to this condition in the years prior to his suicide at age fifty-nine. Some think Hemingway suffered from bipolar disorder. Throughout his life Hemingway was a heavy drinker and succumbed to alcoholism in his twilight years.

Ernest Hemingway is interred in the town cemetery in Ketchum, at the north end of town. A memorial, erected in 1966, is just off of Trail Creek Road, one mile northeast of the Sun Valley Lodge.

Posthumous publications

Ernest Hemingway was a prolific letter writer, and in 1981 many of these were published by Scribner in Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961. It was met with some controversy as Hemingway himself stated he never wished to publish his letters; however the letters provide detail and personality that make the volume more engaging than most Hemingway biographies. Further letters would later be published in a book of his correspondence with his editor Max Perkins, The Only Thing that Counts [1996].

Hemingway was still writing new works up to the time of his death in 1961. All of these unfinished works which were Hemingway's sole creation have been published posthumously; they are A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Nick Adams Stories (portions of which were previously unpublished), The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden. In a note forwarding "Islands in the Stream" Mary Hemingway indicated that she worked with Charles Scribner, Jr. on "preparing this book for publication from Ernest's original manuscript." In that note she stated that "beyond the routine chores of correcting spelling and punctuation, we made some cuts in the manuscript, I feeling that Ernest would surely have made them himself. The book is all Ernest's. We have added nothing to it." Some controversy has surrounded the publication of these works, insofar as it has been suggested that it is not necessarily within the jurisdiction of Hemingway's relatives or publishers to determine whether these works should be made available to the public. For example, scholars often disapprovingly note that the version of The Garden of Eden published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1986, though in no way a revision of Hemingway's original words, nonetheless omits two-thirds of the original manuscript.

In 1999, another novel entitled True at First Light appeared under the name of Ernest Hemingway, though it was heavily edited by his son Patrick Hemingway. Six years later, Under Kilimanjaro, a re-edited and considerably longer version of True at First Light appeared. In either edition, the novel is a fictional account of Hemingway's final African safari in 1953–1954. He spent several months in Kenya with his fourth wife, Mary, before his near-fatal plane crashes took place. Anticipation of the novel, whose manuscript was completed in 1956, adumbrates perhaps an unprecedentedly large critical battle over whether it is proper to publish the work (many sources mention that a new, light side of Hemingway will be seen as opposed to his canonical, macho image), even as editors Robert W. Lewis of University of North Dakota and Robert E. Fleming of University of New Mexico have pushed it through to publication; the novel was published on September 15 2005.

Also published after Hemingway's death were several collections of his work as a journalist. These collections contain his columns and articles for Esquire Magazine, The North American Newspaper Alliance, and the Toronto Star; they include Byline: Ernest Hemingway edited by William White, and Hemingway: The Wild Years edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan. Finally, a collection of introductions, forwards, public letters and other miscellenea was published as Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame in 2005.

Influence and legacy

The influence of Hemingway's writings on American literature was considerable and continues today. Indeed, the influence of Hemingway's style was so widespread that it may be glimpsed in most contemporary fiction, as writers draw inspiration either from Hemingway himself or indirectly through writers who more consciously emulated Hemingway's style. In his own time, Hemingway affected writers within his modernist literary circle. James Joyce called "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" "one of the best stories ever written". Pulp fiction and "hard boiled" crime fiction (which flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s) often owed a strong debt to Hemingway. Hemingway's terse prose style--"Nick stood up. He was all right"-- is known to have inspired Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and many Generation X writers. Hemingway's style also influenced Jack Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers. J.D. Salinger is said to have wanted to be a great American short story writer in the same vein as Hemingway. Hunter S. Thompson often compared himself to Hemingway, and terse Hemingway-esque sentences can be found in The Rum Diary. Beyond the more formal literature authors, popular novelist Elmore Leonard, who authored scores of Western and Crime genre novels, cites Hemingway as his preeminent influence and this is evident in his tightly written prose. Though he never claimed to write serious literature, he did say, "I learned by imitating Hemingway....until I realized that I didn't share his attitude about life. I didn't take myself or anything as seriously as he did."

Hemingway provided a role model to fellow author and hunter Robert Ruark, who is frequently referred to as "the poor man's Ernest Hemingway".

In Latin American literature, Hemingway's impact can perhaps best be seen in the work of Gabriel García Márquez, who, for instance, often uses the sea as a central image in his fiction.

At this writing, only one of Hemingway's sons (Patrick) survives.

Awards and honors

During his lifetime Hemingway was awarded with:

• Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) in World War I
• Bronze Star (War Correspondent-Military Irregular in World War II) in 1947
• Pulitzer Prize in 1953 (for The Old Man and the Sea)
• Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 (The Old Man and the Sea cited as a reason for the award)

Hemingway in fiction, art, and song

• In 1999, Michael Palin retraced the footsteps of Hemingway, in Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure, a television documentary, one hundred years after the birth of his favorite writer. The journey took him through many sites including Chicago, Paris, Italy, Africa, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho. The book is available at his website.

• Since 1987, actor-writer Ed Metzger has portrayed the life of Ernest Hemingway in his one-man stage show, Hemingway: On The Edge, featuring stories and anecdotes from Hemingway's own life and adventures. Metzger quotes Hemingway, "My father told me never kill anything you're not going to eat. At the age of 9, I shot a porcupine. It was the toughest lesson I ever had." More information about the show is available at his website

• Hemingway's World War II experiences in Cuba have been novelized by Dan Simmons as a spy thriller, The Crook Factory.

• Science fiction novelist Joe Haldeman won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for his novella, The Hemingway Hoax, a story which explored the effect that Hemingway's lost stories might have had upon twentieth century history.

• In Harry Turtledove's Alternate History Timeline-191, Hemingway shows up as a character who drove ambulances on the US-Canadian Front in Quebec during the Great War. The character had part of his reproductive organs shot off in the war, giving him severe depression and suicidal tendencies.

• In Dave Sim's graphic novel Cerebus, the story arc "Form and Void" features Ham and Mary Ernestway, parodies of Hemingway and his wife Mary. The last few years of Hemingway's life, including his electroshock therapy, the safari in which he was badly injured, and his suicide, are used as plot points for the story.

• The 1988 film The Moderns locates itself in Hemingway's Paris with a central character named Nick Hart, who befriends Hemingway.

• The famous heavy-metal band, Metallica were inspired by 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' and penned the eponymous song that went on to become a major hit.

• The band Ween mentions Hemingway on the song "Don't Laugh I Love You". The lyrics read, "Ernest Hemingway would always be there for me. But now Ernest Hemingway is dead." Punk rock band Bad Religion references Hemingway in their song "Stranger Than Fiction". The lyric in point, "I want to know why Hemingway cracked."

• Streetlight Manifesto's "Here's to Life" also mentions Hemingway: "Hemingway never seemed to mind the banality of a normal life and I find it gets harder every time. So he aimed the shotgun into the blue. Placed his face in between the two and sighed, 'Here's To Life!'"

• Hemingway is mentioned in Billy Joel's history themed song "We Didn't Start the Fire", as the first figure in the 13th stanza.

• Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz, has mentioned Hemingway several times in his online blog.

• In the MMORPG World of Warcraft, there is a questgiver in Stranglethorn Vale called Hemet Nesingwary. His name is certainly the anagram of Hemingway's, and even their face is similar. Also, Nesingwary wrote a book called "Green Hills of Stranglethorn", a spoof on "Green Hills of Africa".

Trivia

• Sailors were long-known to especially value polydactyl cats (which have extra toes as a genetic trait) for their extraordinary climbing and hunting abilities as an aid in controlling shipboard rodents. Some sailors also considered them to be extremely good luck when at sea. Hemingway was one of the more famous lovers of polydactyl cats. He was first given a six-toed cat by a ship's captain. As provided in his will, his former home in Key West, Florida (which is now a popular museum), currently houses approximately sixty descendants of his cats, approximately 50% of whom are polydactyl. The house and its feline residents make a brief appearance in the 1989 James Bond film Licence to Kill.

• While Hemingway was married to Pauline Pfeiffer, he lived and wrote most of A Farewell to Arms and several short stories at her parents' house in Piggott, Arkansas. The Pfeiffer House has been converted into a museum and is now owned by Arkansas State University.

• According to various biographical sources, Hemingway was six feet tall and weighed anywhere between 170 and 260 pounds at varying times in his life. His build was muscular, though he became paunchy in his middle years. He had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and habitually wore a moustache (with an occasional beard) from the age of 23 on. By age 50, he consistently wore a graying beard. He had a scar on his forehead, the result of a drunken accident in Paris in his late 20s (thinking he was flushing a toilet, he accidentally pulled a skylight down on his head). He suffered from myopia all his life, but vanity prevented him from being fitted with glasses until he was 32 (and very rarely was he photographed wearing them). He was fond of tennis, fonder of fishing and hunting, and hated New York City.

• The actresses Margaux Hemingway and Mariel Hemingway (sisters) are Hemingway's granddaughters.

• Hemingway's memorial is inscribed with a eulogy he wrote for a friend, Gene Van Guilder:

Best of all he loved the fall

The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
Leaves floating on the trout streams
And above the hills
The high blue windless skies
Now he will be a part of them forever

Ernest Hemingway - Idaho - 1939

Works

Novels/Novellas

(1925) The Torrents of Spring

(1926) The Sun Also Rises

(1927) Fiesta (Fiesta is the UK title for The Sun Also Rises)

(1929) A Farewell to Arms

(1937) To Have and Have Not

(1940) For Whom the Bell Tolls

(1950) Across the River and Into the Trees

(1952) The Old Man and the Sea

(1970) Islands in the Stream

(1986) The Garden of Eden

(1999) True At First Light

(2005) Under Kilimanjaro

Nonfiction

(1932) Death in the Afternoon

(1935) Green Hills of Africa

(1962) Hemingway, The Wild Years

(1964) A Moveable Feast

(1967) By-Line: Ernest Hemingway

(1970) Ernest Hemingway: Cub Reporter

(1981) Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961

(1985) The Dangerous Summer

(1985) Dateline: Toronto

Short story collections

(1923) Three Stories and Ten Poems

(1925) In Our Time

(1927) Men Without Women

(1932) The Snows of Kilimanjaro

(1933) Winner Take Nothing

(1938) The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories

(1972) The Nick Adams Stories

(1987) The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

Movies Based on Hemingway's Works

US and UK releases only.

(1932) A Farewell to Arms (starring Gary Cooper)

(1943) For Whom the Bell Tolls (starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman)

(1944) To Have and Have Not (starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall)

(1946) The Killers (starring Burt Lancaster)

(1952) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (starring Gregory Peck)

(1957) A Farewell to Arms (starring Rock Hudson)

(1957) The Sun Also Rises (starring Tyrone Power)

(1958) The Old Man and the Sea (starring Spencer Tracy)

(1962) Adventures of a Young Man

(1964) The Killers (starring Lee Marvin)

(1965) For Whom the Bell Tolls

(1977) Islands in the Stream (starring George C. Scott)

(1984) The Sun Also Rises

(1990) The Old Man and the Sea (starring Anthony Quinn)

References

• Berridge, H.R. (1990). Barron's Book Notes on Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Stuttgart: Klett. ISBN 0-8120-3412-0.
• Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01305-5.
• Baker, Carlos, ed (1962). Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-41157-1. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• "Biography". The Hemingway Resource Center. Retrieved April 12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• Burgess, Anthony (1978). Ernest Hemingway and His World. Norwich: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-684-18504-0.
• Hemingway, Ernest, Carlos Baker, ed (1981). Selected Letters 1917-1961. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-7432-4689-6. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Hemingway, Ernest, Malcolm Cowley, ed (1944). Hemingway (The Viking Portable Library). New York: The Viking Press. ASIN B0007DNS9K. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Lynn, Kenneth Schuyler (1995). Hemingway. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-38732-5.
• Young, Philip (1952). Ernest Hemingway. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. ISBN 0-8166-0191-7.

External links

• Timeless Hemingway
• HemingWiki
• Illustrated Examples of Hemingway First Editions and Inscriptions
• The Hemingway Blog
• One True Sentence: A Blog Devoted to EH
• Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure Based on a PBS lecture series narrated by Michael Palin.
• The Hemingway Society
• CNN: A Hemingway Retrospective
• "Hemingway:On The Edge," A One Man Show
• Review of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
• Review of The Sun Also Rises
• SparkNotes of The Old Man And The Sea
• Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida, official website
• Hemingway on Stage
• Hemingway Home Photos and Information
• Hemingway's Gravesite
• 'Hemingway Goes To War' by Charles Whiting.
• New York Times obituary, July 3, 1961
• [3]Going The Other Way From Home, by Steve Newman