Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway:

Fiction, Heroic and Compassion

Ernest Hemingway is lauded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. He expressed on his writing courage and compassion in a world of violence and death. His combination of fiction and heroic code behavior defined him as one of the great writers of our time. Considered a master of the understood prose style, which became his trademark. His narrow range of characters and his thematic focus on violence and "machismo", as well as his terse, objective prose, have led some critics to regard his fiction world as shallow and insensitive.

Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois and was the son of a physician and a music teacher. He helped promote his larger than life reputation as a robust, belligerent American hero who sought to experience violence as well as write about it. He was a schooled expert in the arenas of war, bullfighting, deep-sea fishing, boxing, big-game hunting, and reckless, extravagant living experiences that he often recounted in his fiction. Although he spent much of his life in foreign countries such as France, Spain, Italy, and Cuba, in particular he was continually in the public eye. Yet, beneath this flamboyance was a man who viewed writing as his sacred occupation, one that he strove always to master. Throughout his career, he earned many awards such as Pulitzer Prize, 1953, for the Old Man and the Sea, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1954 and Award of Merit from American Academy of Arts and letters, 1954.