Ernest Hemingway Biographical info

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a
newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First
World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was
wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals.
After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American
newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.
During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in
Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally
successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's
disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a
reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom
the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old
Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle
with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough,
at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern
society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare
dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories,
some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First
Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.
From Nobel Lectures , Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company,
Amsterdam, 1969
The Lost Generation
Seeking the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the values of American materialism, a number of
intellectuals, poets, artists and writers fled to France in the post World War I years. Paris was the
center of it all.
American poet Gertrude Stein actually coined the expression "lost generation." Speaking to
Ernest Hemingway, she said, "you are all a lost generation." The term stuck and the mystique
surrounding these individuals continues to fascinate us.
Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had
love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.
There were many literary artists involved in the groups known as the Lost Generation. The three
best known are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Others usually

included among the list are: Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford
and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Ernest Hemingway was the Lost Generation's leader in the adaptation of the naturalistic
technique in the novel. Hemingway volunteered to fight with the Italians in World War I and his
Midwestern American ignorance was shattered during the resounding defeat of the Italians by the
Central Powers at Caporetto. Newspapers of the time reported Hemingway, with dozens of
pieces of shrapnel in his legs, had heroically carried another man out. That episode even made
the newsreels in America. These war time experiences laid the groundwork of his novel, A
Farewell to Arms (1929). Another of his books, The Sun Also Rises (1926) was a naturalistic and
shocking expression of post-war disillusionment.
Hemingway and The Lost Generation
When Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris late in 1921 to take up residence in the AngloAmerican enclave of avant-garde artists and intellectuals there, his literary aspirations were
purely speculative. Yet at twenty-two, this would-be writer somehow engendered credibility;
even before he published anything major, many of the enclave's expatriate literati, among them
Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, regarded him as a significant talent. The belief in him proved
well founded. With the publication of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926, Hemingway
emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation. Over the next several decades,
many of his short stories and novels would be embraced as classics almost overnight.
In his own lifetime, Hemingway's fame rested nearly as much on his personality as it did on his
art. Between his expertise as an outdoor sportsman, his stints as a war correspondent, and his
enthusiasm for bullfighting and boxing, he became a symbol of virile glamour, and his celebrity
even among those who never read his books was a phenomenon unique in American letters. His
most enduring legacy, however, is his crisp, direct storytelling prose, which has been a shaping
influence for countless writers of the twentieth century.