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A Farewell to Arms
For Whom the Bell Tolls movies The Old Man and the Sea movies The Snows of Kilimanjaro movies Home pages: The Greatest Literature of All Time
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Yet Hemingway may be the most popular serious writer of the twentieth century. His books seldom top critics' or scholars' lists, but they continue to sell year after year. The life and character of the man known as Papa Hemingway is even more familiar than his writing. Everyone knows that Hemingway was a great aficionado of bullfighting, hunting and fishing. That he was preoccupied with war and death, serving the Italian army in World War I, reporting on the Spanish Civil War, and chasing Nazi boats in the Caribbean during World War II. That he was part of the legendary artistic crowd in Paris in the 1920s along with other expatriate literary lights like F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Morley Callaghan who famously knocked him down in a boxing match. That he was married four times. That when his health deteriorated he took his own life with a shotgun blast. It's all so virile, macho even. His writing is often referred to as tersely descriptive with staccato, clipped dialogue and characters affecting tough masculinity. His style is called simple and deliberate, every word written as if carved in granite. Yet I find his prose among the most sensitive and beautifully understated, and having the power to completely transport me to the place and situation of his characters. It's the art that hides art. Many have copied his seemingly uncomplicated style but have learned through their failure how very difficult it is to create the illusion of simplicity. For me Hemingway is a phenomenologist (a term he probably would have disparaged). He experiences the world and then writes in such a way as to have the reader experience it too — the surface sensation, the taste, the just-right view, the feel on the back of the neck, the urgency, the peace, the restlessness. All without seeming to make an effort to do so. It all goes down like a drink of water but one eventually realizes that one has been transported by a rare liqueur. Ernest Hemingway was born and raised in Illinois, U.S.A., and worked as a writer for newspapers both before and after the first war, including stints in Kansas and Toronto. His first book, The Torrents of Spring (1925) was a parody of a novel by Sherwood Anderson, once his idol. He gained his early reputation though as a writer of short stories that appeared quirky and abrupt to readers then, but have been imitated ever since and now seem perfectly natural. His first widely available collection of stories was In Our Time (1925) published while he was a foreign correspondent in Paris. Around this time he also wrote his first acclaimed novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) about a similar foreign correspondent in Paris who takes time out to visit the bullfights in Spain with other members of the so-called "lost generation". This was followed by another story collection, Men Without Women (1927), and another novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), a doomed wartime love story, which confirmed his reputation as the preeminent writer of his generation. Death in the Afternoon (1932) is a non-fictional account of bullfighting, while Green Hills of Africa (1935) is an attempt to present an actual hunting expedition with his wife as though he were writing a novel. Winner Take Nothing (1933) and To Have and Have Not (1937) are further story collections. The Fifth Column (1939) is a play about the Spanish Civil War.
Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), concerning a disgraced Second World World general reminiscing, was his most negatively reviewed novel, suffering from the lack of a gripping plot or interesting characters. But his next, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), was hailed a masterpiece and led to Hemingway being awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. It has been adapted several times for film, most notably in 1958 while Hemingway was still around. Since Hemingway's death in 1961, his works continued to appear, as his unfinished manuscripts were edited and released by his heirs and publishers, along with reorganized collections of earlier works. A Moveable Feast (1964) recounts his Paris years. Islands in the Stream (1970) is an unpolished, though often rewarding, novel based partly on his Caribbean exploits. The Dangerous Summer (1985) is a long, meandering magazine article written in 1959 and cut drastically to produce this posthumous book about a Spanish bullfighting season—third-rate Hemingway on a subject already covered (and much better) in The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon. (Don't blame Hemingway. He just thought he was writing a throwaway piece of journalism that would never be seen again.) The Garden of Eden (1986) is Hemingway's kinkiest novel and was obviously discarded by the master stylist before reaching a state he would have considered suitable for publication. True at First Light (1999) may be seen as a sequel to Green Hills of Africa twenty years later, a more-or-less true account of an extended hunting trip in Africa with a different wife. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (1964), The Nick Adams Stories (1972) and The Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987) are all collections containing previously published short stories. The Snows of Kilimanjaro is particularly recommended for its inclusion of such classic Hemingway pieces as the famous title story, as well as "The Killers" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", many of which have been adapted for films. — Eric |
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© Copyright 2002-200 4 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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HEMINGWAY, Ernest 
His greatest work in my opinion however is his
next novel,