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Portrait of Ernest Hemingway

Literature · Novelists

Ernest Hemingway

1899–1961 · American

Modernism; the Lost Generation

Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist whose terse, understated prose transformed 20th-century English style. Drawing on his wounding as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy, expatriate life in 1920s Paris, bullfighting, the Spanish Civil War and big-game hunting, he wrote The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, and died by suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.

How to spot them

  • ▸'Papa'; spare prose and the 'iceberg theory' of omission
  • ▸Paris in the 1920s with Gertrude Stein and the 'Lost Generation'; A Moveable Feast
  • ▸Pamplona bullfights, Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley
  • ▸Santiago the Cuban fisherman and his giant marlin
  • ▸Key West, Finca Vigía in Cuba, and Ketchum, Idaho

Key works

In Our Time (1925)

Short-story collection introducing Nick Adams

The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta in the UK) (1926)

Expatriates, including the wounded Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, travel from Paris to the fiesta at Pamplona

A Farewell to Arms (1929)

American ambulance officer Frederic Henry and nurse Catherine Barkley on the Italian front in World War I

Death in the Afternoon (1932)

Non-fiction study of Spanish bullfighting

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936)

Short story of a dying writer on safari in Africa

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

American Robert Jordan blows up a bridge for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War; title from John Donne

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Aging Cuban fisherman Santiago battles a giant marlin; won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize

A Moveable Feast (1964 (posthumous))

Memoir of his early years in Paris with Hadley, Stein, Fitzgerald and Pound

Key ideas

  • Iceberg theory: most of a story's meaning lies unstated beneath a sparse surface
  • The 'code hero' who shows grace under pressure in the face of violence and death
  • Hugely influential plain, declarative style with short sentences and repetition

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Oak Park, Illinois
  • •Seriously wounded by mortar fire in Italy in 1918 while serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver
  • •The Sun Also Rises carries Gertrude Stein's remark 'You are all a lost generation' as an epigraph
  • •Won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature 'for his mastery of the art of narrative', citing The Old Man and the Sea
  • •Married four times: Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh
  • •Survived two plane crashes in Africa in 1954 and was too ill to attend the Nobel ceremony
  • •His house in Key West is known for its many six-toed (polydactyl) cats
  • •Lived at Finca Vigía near Havana; died by suicide in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961
  • •Wrote that all modern American literature comes from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (Green Hills of Africa)

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources