Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War One later known as "the Lost Generation," a term Gertrude Stein used according to his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast. ("'That's what you are. That's what you all are,' Miss Stein said. 'All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.'" Stein had overheard a garage owner use the phrase to criticize a mechanic.) He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, in contrast to the style of his literary rival William Faulkner. It had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoic men who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered canonical in American literature

First novels and other early works

After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park., [7] in 1920, he moved to an apartment on 1599 Bathurst Street, now known as The Hemingway, in the Humewood-Cedarvale neighborhood in Toronto, Ontario.[8] During his stay, he found a job with the Toronto Star newspaper. He worked as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent. Hemingway befriended fellow Star reporter Morley Callaghan. Callaghan had begun writing short stories at this time; he showed them to Hemingway, who praised them as fine work. They would later be reunited in Paris. For a short time from late 1920 through most of 1921, Hemingway lived on the near north side of Chicago, while still filing stories for The Toronto Star. He also worked as associate editor of the Co-operative Commonwealth, a monthly journal. On September 3rd, 1921, Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. After the honeymoon they moved to a cramped top floor apartment on the 1300 block of Clark Street.[9] In September, he moved to a cramped fourth floor apartment (3rd floor by Chicago building standard) at 1239 North Dearborn in a then run-down section of Chicago's near north side. The building still stands with a plaque on the front of it calling it "The Hemingway Apartment." Hadley found it dark and depressing, but in December, 1921, the Hemingways left Chicago and Oak Park, never to live there again, and moved abroad. At the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris, France, where Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the Toronto Star. Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced him to the "Parisian Modern Movement" then ongoing in the Montparnasse Quarter; this was the beginning of the

American expatriate circle that became known as the "Lost Generation", a term popularized by Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir, A Moveable Feast. The epithet, "Lost Generation" was reportedly appropriated by Miss Stein from her French garage mechanic when he made the offhand comment that hers was "une generation perdue". His other influential mentor was Ezra Pound,[10] the founder of imagism. Hemingway later said of this eclectic group, "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right." [11] The group often frequented Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 12 Rue de l'Odon. After the 1922 publication and American banning of colleague James Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway used Toronto-based friends to smuggle copies of the novel into the United States (Hemingway writes of meeting and talking with Joyce in Paris in A Moveable Feast). His own first book, called Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), was published in Paris by Robert McAlmon. After much success as a foreign correspondent, Hemingway returned to Toronto, Canada in 1923. During his second stint living in Toronto, Hemingway's first son was born. He was named John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, but would later be known as Jack. Hemingway asked Gertrude Stein to be Jack's godmother. Around the same time, Hemingway had a bitter falling out with his editor, Harry Hindmarsh, who believed Hemingway had been spoiled by his time overseas. [12] Hindmarsh gave Hemingway mundane assignments, and Hemingway grew bitter and wrote an angry resignation in December of 1923. However, his resignation was either ignored or rescinded, and Hemingway continued to write sporadically for The Toronto Star through 1924.[13] Most of Hemingway's work for the Star was later published in the 1985 collection Dateline: Toronto. Hemingway's American literary debut came with the publication of the short story cycle In Our Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters of the American version were initially published in Europe as in our time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway, reaffirming to him that his minimalist style could be accepted by the literary community. "Big Two-Hearted River" is the collection's best-known story. In April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald at the Dingo Bar. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were at first close friends, often drinking and talking together. They sometimes exchanged manuscripts, and Fitzgerald tried to do much to advance Hemingway's career and the publication of his first collections of stories. Hemingway's relationships in France provided inspiration for Hemingway's first fulllength novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926) (published in the U.K. under the title "Fiesta"). The novel was semi-autobiographical, following a group of expatriate Americans around Paris and Spain. The climactic scenes of the novel are set in Pamplona, during the fiesta that the novel made famous throughout Europe and the U.S. The novel was a success and met with critical acclaim. While Hemingway had initially claimed that the novel was an obsolete form of

literature, he was apparently inspired to write it after reading Fitzgerald's manuscript for The Great Gatsby. Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic from Piggott, Arkansas. Pfeiffer was an occasional fashion reporter, publishing in magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue.[14] Hemingway converted to Catholicism himself at this time. That year saw the publication of Men Without Women, a collection of short stories, containing The Killers, one of Hemingway's best-known and mostanthologized stories. In 1928, Hemingway and Pfeiffer moved to Key West, Florida, to begin their new life together. However, their new life was soon interrupted by yet another tragic event in Hemingway's life. In 1928, Hemingway's father, Clarence, troubled with diabetes and financial instabilities, committed suicide using an old Civil War pistol. This greatly hurt Hemingway and is perhaps played out through Robert Jordan's father's suicide in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. He immediately traveled to Oak Park to arrange the funeral and stirred up controversy by vocalizing what he thought to be the Catholic view, that suicides go to Hell. At about the same time, Harry Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press and a friend of Hemingway's from his days in Paris, also committed suicide. Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms recounts the romance between Frederic Henry, an American soldier, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The novel is heavily autobiographical: the plot was directly inspired by his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky in Milan; Catherine's parturition was inspired by the intense labor pains of Pauline in the birth of Patrick; the real-life Kitty Cannell inspired the fictional Helen Ferguson; the priest was based on Don Giuseppe Bianchi, the priest of the 69th and 70th regiments of the Brigata Ancona. While the inspiration of the character Rinaldi is obscure, he had already appeared in In Our Time. A Farewell to Arms was published at a time when many other World War I books were prominent, including Frederic Manning's Her Privates We, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That. The success of A Farewell to Arms made Hemingway financially independent.

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea is a novella (just over 100 pages in length) by Ernest Hemingway, written in Cuba in 1951 and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction to be produced by Hemingway and published in his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it centers upon Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.[1] It is noteworthy in twentieth century fiction, reaffirming Hemingway's worldwide literary prominence as well as being a significant factor in his selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954

Background and publication

Most people maintain that the years following Hemingway's publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 until 1952 were the bleakest in his literary career. The novel Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) was almost unanimously disparaged by critics as self-parody. Evidently his participation as an Allied correspondent in World War II did not yield fruits equivalent to those wrought of his experiences in World War I (A Farewell to Arms, 1929) or the Spanish Civil War (For Whom the Bell Tolls). Hemingway had initially planned to use Santiago's story, which became The Old Man and the Sea, as part of a random intimacy between mother and son and also the fact of relationships that cover most of the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to as "The Sea Book." Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream. Positive feedback he received for On the Blue Water (Esquire, April 1936) led him to rewrite it as an independent work. The book is a novella because it has no chapters or parts and is slightly longer than a short story. He also referred to the Bible as the "Sea of Knowledge" and other such things. The novel first appeared, in its 26,500-word entirety, as part of the September 1, 1952 edition of Life magazine. 5.3 million copies of that issue were sold within two days. The majority of concurrent criticism was positive, although some dissenting criticism has since emerged. The title was misprinted on the cover of an early edition as The Old Men and the Sea.

Inspiration for character

While Hemingway was living in Cuba beginning in 1940 with his third wife Martha Gellhorn, one of his favorite pastimes was to sail and fish in his boat, named the Pilar. General biographical consensus holds that the model for Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea was, at least in part, the Cuban fisherman Gregorio Fuentes. Fuentes, also known as Goyo to his friends, was born in 1897 on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, migrated to Cuba when he was six years old and met Hemingway there in 1928. In the 1930s, Hemingway hired him to look after his boat. During Hemingway's Cuban years a strong friendship formed between Hemingway and Fuentes. For almost thirty years, Fuentes served as the captain of the Pilar; this included time during which Hemingway did not live in Cuba. Fuentes at times would admit that the story was not exactly about him. He related that the true inspiration of the old man and the boy did exist but they never knew who they were. The story goes that in the late 1940s, upon return from an early morning fishing trip, Fuentes and Hemingway saw a small rowboat 10 miles out to sea. Hemingway asked Fuentes to approach the vessel to see if they needed help. Inside the boat was an old man and a boy. As

the vessels closed in the old man began yelling at them with insults including telling them to go to hell, indicating that they had scared away the fish. According to Fuentes, he and Hemingway looked at each other in surprise. Just the same, Hemingway asked Fuentes to lower them some food and drinks while the old man and boy glared at them. Without another word exchanged, the two boats parted ways. According to Fuentes, Hemingway began immediately to write in his notebook and later asked him to find the old man. According to Fuentes, he never was able to find the fisherman that had made such an impression on Hemingway. Fuentes recounts that this was the real origin of the lore. A few years after The Old Man and the Sea was published, residents of Cojimar believed that the old fisherman that Fuentes and Hemingway ran into at sea was a humble local fisherman they called el viejo Miguel; some described his physical appearance as a wiry Spencer Tracy. Fuentes, suffering from cancer, died in 2002; he was 104 years old. Prior to his death, he donated Hemingway's Pilar to the Cuban government.[3]

Plot summary
The Old Man and the Sea recounts an epic battle between an old, experienced fisherman and a giant marlin said to be the largest catch of his life. It opens by explaining that the fisherman, who is named Santiago (but only directly referred to outside of dialogue as "the old man"), has gone 84 days without catching any fish at all. He is apparently so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with the old man and been ordered to fish with more successful fishermen. Still dedicated to the old man, however, the boy visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling back his fishing gear, feeding him, and discussing American baseballmost notably Santiago's idol, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture far out into the Gulf to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end. Thus on the eighty-fifth day, Santiago sets out alone, taking his skiff far into the Gulf. He sets his lines and, by noon of the first day, a big fish that he is sure is a marlin takes his bait. Unable to pull in the great marlin, Santiago instead finds the fish pulling his skiff. Two days and two nights pass in this manner, during which the old man bears the tension of the line with his body. Though he is wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a compassionate appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother. On the third day of the ordeal, the fish begins to circle the skiff, indicating his tiredness to the old man. Santiago, now completely worn out and almost in delirium, uses all the strength he has left in him to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon, thereby ending the long battle between the old man and the tenacious fish. Santiago straps the marlin to his skiff and heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him at the market and how many people he will feed. However, the old man determines that because of the fish's great dignity, no one will be worthy of eating the marlin.

While Santiago continues his journey back to the shore, sharks are attracted to the trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. The first, a great mako shark, Santiago kills with his harpoon, losing that weapon in the process. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; in total, five sharks are slain and many others are driven away. But by night, the sharks have almost devoured the marlin's entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting mostly of its backbone, its tail and its head, the latter still bearing the giant spear. The old man castigates himself for sacrificing the marlin. Finally reaching the shore before dawn on the next day, he struggles on the way to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and enters a very deep sleep. Ignorant of the old man's journey, a group of fishermen gathers the next day around the boat where the fish's skeleton is still attached. One of the fishermen measures it to be eighteen feet from nose to tail. Tourists at the nearby caf mistakenly take it for a shark. Manolin, worried during the old man's endeavor, cries upon finding him safe asleep. The boy brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise to fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of lions on the African beach.

Symbolism of character
The Old Man and the Sea allows various interpretations. Hemingway emphasizes that:
No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. [4]

The style of the work, the simplicity and the concreteness of its descriptions, provides a rich opportunity for symbolic interpretations. Some insights follow. Santiago represents Christ suffering. Hemingway compares him to Jesus Christ on several occasions. Santiago "...picked the mast up and put it on his shoulder and started up the road. He...[sat] down five times before he reached his shack" (121) much like Jesus did on the journey to his crucifixion, carrying the cross. Later Santiago sleeps "...face down ... with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up" (122), the position of Jesus on the cross. All throughout the book the old man wishes for salt, a staple seasoning in the human diet. He is a fisherman, similar to Christ's disciples. It is also quite ironic that he is longing for salt in the environment that abounds in besides open space, salty sea water. Quite like the predicament of man, he feels he is surrounded by "it" yet it is precisely "it" that he longs for. He wishes the dissolved salt (it) could crystallize and be intelligible to him. The marlin represents what man is searching for whether it may be good or bad. Some men love their gods, but he hates the fish as men hate their gods. The fish was very

beautiful and huge and Santiago felt a connection with it, he considered it his brother. Hemingway says that Santiago is not a religious man, but he seems to have some faith as shown by his offers to say his "Hail Marys" and praises if he catches the marlin.

Literary significance and criticism

The Old Man and the Sea served to reinvigorate Hemingway's literary reputation and prompted a reexamination of his entire body of work. The novella was initially received with much popularity; it restored many readers' confidence in Hemingway's capability as an author. Its publisher, Scribner's, on an early dust jacket, called the novella a "new classic," and many critics favorably compared it with such works as William Faulkner's "The Bear" and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Following such acclaim, however, a school of critics emerged that interpreted the novella as a disappointing minor work. For example, critic Philip Young provided an admiring review in 1952, just following The Old Man and the Sea's publication, in which he stated that it was the book "in which Hemingway said the finest single thing he ever had to say as well as he could ever hope to say it." However, in 1966, Young claimed that the "failed novel" too often "went way out." These self-contradictory views show that critical reaction ranged from adoration of the book's mythical, pseudo-religious intonations to flippant dismissal as pure fakery. The latter is founded in the notion that Hemingway, once a devoted student of realism, failed in his depiction of Santiago as a supernatural, clairvoyant impossibility. Joseph Waldmeir's essay entitled "Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man" is one of the most famed favorable critical readings of the novellaand one which has defined analytical considerations since. Perhaps the most memorable claim therein is Waldmeir's answer to the rhetorical question, Just what is the book's message? The answer assumes a third level on which The Old Man and the Sea must be readas a sort of allegorical commentary on all his previous work, by means of which it may be established that the religious overtones of The Old Man and the Sea are not peculiar to that book among Hemingway's works, and that Hemingway has finally taken the decisive step in elevating what might be called his philosophy of Manhood to the level of a religion. Waldmeir was one of the most prominent critics to wholly consider the function of the novella's Christian imagery, made most evident through Santiago's blatant reference to the crucifixion following his sighting of the sharks that reads: Ay, he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood. Waldmeir's analysis of this line, supplemented with other instances of similar symbolism, caused him to claim that The Old Man and the Sea was a seminal work in raising

Hemingway's "philosophy of Manhood" to a religious level. This hallmark criticism stands as one of the most durable, positive treatments of the novella. On the other hand, one of the most outspoken critics of The Old Man and the Sea is Robert P. Weeks. His 1962 piece "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea" presents his claim that the novella is a weak and unexpected divergence from the typical, realistic Hemingway (referring to the rest of Hemingway's body of work as "earlier glories"). In juxtaposing this novella against Hemingway's previous works, Weeks explains that The difference, however, in the effectiveness with which Hemingway employs this characteristic device in his best work and in The Old Man and the Sea is illuminating. The work of fiction in which Hemingway devoted the most attention to natural objects, The Old Man and the Sea, is pieced out with an extraordinary quantity of fakery, extraordinary because one would expect to find no inexactness, no romanticizing of natural objects in a writer who loathed W.H. Hudson, could not read Thoreau, deplored Melville's rhetoric in Moby Dick, and who was himself criticized by other writers, notably Faulkner, for his devotion to the facts and his unwillingness to "invent."

Awards and nominations

The Old Man and the Sea led to numerous accolades for Hemingway, including the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He also earned the Award of Merit Medal for the Novel from the American Academy of Letters that same year. Most prestigiously, the Nobel Prize in Literature came in 1954, "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Set in Africa, it was published in 1936 concurrently with "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." As the story opens, Francis Macomber and his wife Margaret (usually referred to as 'Margot'), are being guided on a big-game hunt by professional hunter Robert Wilson. We learn that earlier in the day Francis had panicked and, in his own words, "bolted like a rabbit" when a wounded lion charged him. Margot mocks Macomber for this act of cowardice, and that night she sleeps with Wilson. The next day the party chase down three buffalo, and Macomber joins Wilson in killing two of them. Exhilarated by the hunt, Macomber feels transformed and no longer afraid. "You know I dont think Id ever be afraid of anything again," he says. It is soon learned that the third buffalo was only wounded and has gone into the bush. Wilson and Macomber will have to track and kill the wounded animal, reproducing the dangerous circumstances of the previous day's lion hunt. Still Macomber feels unafraid, and when the buffalo charges him he stands his ground and fires at it, "shooting a touch high each

time and hitting the heavy horns, splintering and chipping them like hitting a slate roof". Margot grabs a gun, ostensibly to stop the still-charging buffalo, but her shot hits Macomber, killing him. Though Wilson says he will report Macomber's death as accidental, it is unclear whether Margot shot him on purpose or by accident. An important passage in the story occurs in the moments just before Francis and Robert Wilson go into the bush after the buffalo.
"You've gotten awfully brave, awfully suddenly," his wife said contemptuously, but her contempt was not secure. She was very afraid of something. Macomber laughed, a very natural hearty laugh. "You know I have ," he said. "I really have." "Isn't it sort of late?" Margot said bitterly. Because she had done the best she could for many years back and the way they were together now was no one person's fault. "Not for me," said Macomber.

From this dialogue, the reader sees that Margot has lost her edge in the relationship. She is no longer in charge and deeply resents Macomber's new-found courage.

Critical response
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" has been acclaimed as one of Hemingway's most successful artistic achievements. This is largely due to the ambiguous complexity of its characters and their motivations, and the debate this ambiguity has generated. The most prominent source of debate, of course, is whether Margot's shooting of her husband was deliberate, accidental, or some combination of the two. In the estimation of critic Kenneth G. Johnston, "the prevailing critical view is that she deliberatelyor at best, 'accidentally on purpose'murdered him", but there are many, including Johnston himself, who hold the opposite view. Hemingway scholar Carlos Baker calls Margot Macomber "easily the most unscrupulous of Hemingway's fictional females"; a woman "who is really and literally deadly" and who "covets her husband's money but values even more her power over him." A related point that has been widely debated is whether Hemingway intended the reader to view Robert Wilson as a heroic figure, embodying Hemingway's ideal of the courageous, hyper-masculine male. Critics who argue for Margot's innocence are especially likely to question this positive view of Wilson. It is through Wilson's words that Margot's intentions are questioned, notably when he asks after the shooting "Why didn't you poison him? That's what they do in England." If Wilson is intended to be the story's voice of morality, then this implied accusation is damning. But if Wilson is a less-perfect character himself, then his judgement of Margot is suspect. Some critics have noted that Wilson chases down the buffalo in a car, violating the law and perhaps also Hemingway's code of fairness in hunting. Kenneth G. Johnston argues that Wilson "has much to gain by making Mrs. Macomber believe that the

death of her husband could be construed as murder," since he could lose his license if Margot accurately described Wilson's use of the car in the buffalo hunt.

Frank O'Connor on "The Short Happy Life"

In The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, author and literary critic Frank O'Connor, though generally an admirer of Hemingway, gives one of the most colorful and uncharitable summations of "The Short Happy Life":
Francis runs away from a lion, which is what most sensible men would do if faced by a lion, and his wife promptly cuckolds him with the English manager of their big-game hunting expedition. As we all know, good wives admire nothing in a husband except his capacity to deal with lions, so we can sympathize with the poor woman in her trouble. But next day Macomber, faced with a buffalo, suddenly becomes a man of superb courage, and his wife, recognizing that[...] for the future she must be a virtuous wife, blows his head off. [...] To say that the psychology of this story is childish would be to waste good words. As farce it ranks with "Ten Nights in a Bar Room" or any other Victorian morality you can think of. Clearly, it is the working out of a personal problem that for the vast majority of men and women has no validity whatever.

Characters

Francis Macomber - The husband Margot Macomber - Wife of Francis Robert Wilson - Professional hunter