Earnest Hemingway

Earnest Hemingway

As one of the 20th century's most important and influential writers. His writings drew heavily on his own experiences for his writing. His writing reflected his trouble with relating to women and his tendency to treat them as objects, as he had four marriages and countless affairs, highlighting his theme of alienation and disconnection. Now here is why he is what he is by writing about what he was.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, to Dr. Clarence Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway. Oak Park was a mainly Protestant, upper middle-class suburb of Chicago that Hemingway would later refer to as a "town of wide lawns and narrow minds" (Gerogiannis 188). The second among six children, Ernest spent the first two years of his life dressed as a girl by his mother. She called him "Ernestine" and fantasized that he was the twin of his older sister, as she dressed them both in matching dresses and gave them similar hairstyles (Rozkis 233) As he grew older, however, his father stepped in and insisted that Ernest be "raised like a man," teaching Ernest how to behave and introducing him at a young age to hunting, fishing, and boxing, all activities in which he would stay interested for the rest of his life (Gerogiannis) It is perhaps this early start at questioning his manliness and his father's attempts to drive any femininity out of him that instilled his characteristic obsession with proving his masculinity throughout his life.

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Hemingway received his schooling in the Oak Park public school system. In high school he was mediocre at sports, joining the football, swimming, basketball, and water polo teams and serving as the track team manager (Nelson 5). He began his journalistic career writing for the school paper, the Trapeze, where he wrote his first articles and often humorous pieces in the style of Ring Lardner, a popular satirist of the time. After graduating in the spring of 1917, against the wishes of his parents, he forwent college and took a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. It is here that the seeds of his unmistakable staccato writing style were planted as he followed the rules of the Star's stylebook exactly. "Use short sentences," it said. "Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English, not forgetting to strive for smoothness. Be positive, not negative" (Gerogiannis 201)

The allure of the war in Europe, however, was too strong for a young man looking to prove his manliness. After only six months on staff at the Star, Hemingway resigned and attempted to enlist in the army, only to be rejected because of poor vision. Determined to get involved in the war, he joined the Red Cross and was shipped off to Italy as an ambulance driver. His first day on the job, a munitions factory exploded and he had to carry the bodies and body parts of the women who worked in the factory to a makeshift morgue. Only a few weeks later, as he was distributing chocolate and cigarettes to Italian soldiers in the trenches near the front lines, Hemingway was seriously wounded by fragments from an Austrian mortar shell which had landed only a few feet away. Hemingway claimed, despite over 200 pieces of shrapnel being lodged in his legs and being shot in the legs several times, he managed to carry a wounded soldier back to the

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first aid station. For this feat, he was awarded the Silver Medal for Valor by the Italian government. Because of his tendency to exaggerate his heroism in telling of his own feats, however, some believe that Hemingway may have changed some details about the event in retelling it or fabricated it altogether (Rozkis 235).

After rehabilitating in Milan for a short time, Hemingway returned home and was celebrated as a war hero. He was nineteen years old and only a year out of high school, but his short experience in the war had matured him beyond his years. Living with his parents, who never quite appreciated what their son had been through, was difficult. His short story "Soldier's Home" reflects his feelings of frustration and shame upon returning home to a world that still has a romantic notion of war and fails to understand its psychological impact.

Shortly after meeting Hadley Richardson in early 1920 and marrying her in 1921, Hemingway was offered a job as European correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly. Eager to return to Europe, he accepted and he and his new bride moved to Paris, where many budding writers were flocking and the living expenses were low, thanks to the skyrocketing value of the American dollar following the war. He soon began writing fiction earnestly and immersed himself in the local literary scene, becoming well acquainted with other writers such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce. With Fitzgerald, he formed a close literary friendship, even to the point that Fitzgerald convinced him to remove the first chapter of The Sun Also Rises, which explains the backgrounds of all the characters (Gerogiannis 190). After months of intense writing in Paris, Hemingway had completed the manuscripts of several short stories,

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poems, and novels, including A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, but, just before Christmas, Hadley put all of these manuscripts in a valise to bring them to him at a Lausanne Peace Conference, and they were stolen and never recovered. Luckily, two manuscripts that happened to be in other hands at the time were able to be published: Three Stories and Ten Poems, and the story "My Old Man," which was selected to appear in The Best Short Stories of 1923.

The Hemingways returned to the United States briefly in 1923 so their first child, John Hadley Nicanor "Bumby" Hemingway, could be born on American soil, but quickly returned so Ernest could resume concentrating on his writing and reconstruct the works he had lost. In December of 1924 the collection of short stories in our times (characterized by its lowercase title) was published in Europe and almost a year later, the American version, In Our Times, which was expanded greatly from its European counterpart, was published by Boni and Liveright. He soon wrote a parody of his once friend Sherwood Anderson entitled The Torrents of Spring. Raymond S. Nelson writes that he wrote this "partly to vent his anger at what he felt was Anderson's compromising style and partly to break his contract with Boni and Liveright, Anderson's publisher" (7). The publishing house refused to publish it and Hemingway was free to have Charles Scribner publish not only Torrents, but also his first major novel, the second version of The