The Authors

The Authors

In the world of writing, the writer's lifestyle, imagination, background, or world views is what will make the piece attractive. The three writers' T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote most of their pieces with the way they viewed the world or things that had occurred in their lives. The following paragraphs will tell you about the writers past to induce them into writing what they did.

T.S. Eliot, a very cerebral poet and also wrote essays. Eliot grew up in a fine family, his father was a business man and his mother was very involved in the community and wrote poetry. Eliot went on to going into Harvard where he earned his PhD in philosophy. After attending Harvard, he traveled around Germany on a travel scholarship and later attended Oxford University where he only stayed a year. His early works reflected the disillusionment of the postwar generation and the tragedy of contemporary civilization. In 1928 Eliot considered himself an Anglo-Catholic, which reflected in his poetry a more positive turn. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in 1948.

Eliot's poetic themes concentrate on the condition of the world and only gain an optimistic strain later as a result of his conversion to Christianity. His new-found worldview colors his later works into optimism rather than despair, though he recognizes that the world is still a dark place in which to live. His poems "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Death by Water" from the poem "The Waste Land" are two manifestations of his early social disillusionment while "The Hollow Men" and "Journey of the Magi" are written later with the more hopeful backdrop of Christianity.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, in an orthodox higher middle class family as the second of six children. His mother, Mrs. Grace Hale Hemingway, an ex-opera singer, was an authoritarian woman who had reduced his father, Mr. Clarence Edmunds Hemingway, a physician, to the level of a hen-pecked husband. Hemingway had a rather unhappy childhood on account of his 'mother's, bullying relations with his father'. He grew up under the influence of his father who encouraged him to develop outdoor interests such as swimming, fishing and hunting. His early boyhood was spent in the northern woods of Michigan among the native Indians, where he learned the primitive aspects of life such as fear, pain, danger and death. At school, he had a brilliant academic career and graduated at the age of 17 from the Oak Park High School. In 1917 he joined the Kansas City `Star' as a war correspondent. The following year he participated in the World War by volunteering to work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but twice decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919 and married Hadley Richardson in 1921. This was the first of a series of unhappy marriages and divorces. The next year, he reported on the Greco-Turkish War and two years later, gave up journalism to devote himself to fiction. Later in life, Hemingway's father committed suicide; Hemingway was very disturbed by this event in his life. He questioned his father's courage, or lack of courage. His father had taught him to admire courage. Once, Hemingway defined courage as grace under pressure. Yet his father could not handle this extreme pressure. He felt his father had somehow failed him. Soon, Hemingway assumed the nickname Papa, which he held to the end of his life. He was taking on the burden of being the person, or ideal papa, that his own father had failed to be. In his early years, Hemingway was very close to Sherwood Anderson, a writer he highly admired. Soon the critics started to label Hemingway as Anderson's disciple. Hemingway didn't like this because he wanted to be his own man. What resulted was The Torrents of Spring in which Hemingway ridiculed and parodied Anderson's style of writing, his characters, and his most cherished ideas about life. With