Hemingway And His Writing example essay topic

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway was a great American author. He was a giant of modern literature. Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. He was the first son of Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway and the second of their six children. Hemingway's gather was a doctor and his mother was a music teacher. Hemingway's parents owned a cabin in northern Michigan where he spent most of his summers hunting and fishing, being separated from the rest of middle-class society.

Hemiongway's mother was a strict person and tried to impose a moral order her children. This caused hostility between mother and son. A major dispute arose between the two when Hemingway returned home from the war and went to the family cabin to get through the physical and psychologically rough experience he had. His mother complained about his slow pace re-adjustment to normal, civilian life. Ultimately, Hemingway left his secluded cabin and went to Paris in the 1920's. Hemingway's father was having a rough time during this portion of Hemingway's life.

His father was suffering from diabetes. He also had some financial misfortune and chronic depression. This all ended in 1928 when a self-inflicted pistol shot ended his life. This is when Hemingway was just starting to see the material rewards of his developing literary career. Hemingway did not have a very good childhood. Although his youth was bad, and unhappy, Hemingway viewed it as an essential artistic and personal resource for the development of an individual 'heroic code.

' About the time that Hemingway graduated from high school, the Untied States was entering World War I. He tried to enlist in the army, but was not accepted due to a vision problem. When he heard that the Red Cross was taking volunteers to be ambulance drivers in the war, he took the opportunity and made it to the war. Hemingway was assigned to the front lines in Italy. After he had only been at the front for a few days, and a few days before his nineteenth birthday, Hemingway was wounded. A mortar fire at Foss alta di Piv i sent shrapnel into his legs.

While Hemingway was injured, he met a nurse and fell in love with her. He proposed marriage, but like Granny Weatherall, he was jilted and his nurse married and Italian officer. Hemingway recovered from his injuries, and with the war coming to an end, he returned home. I believe that World War I had a great affect on how Hemingway wrote, and what he wrote about. A lot of Hemingway's stories relate to the war somehow, whether it is directly or indirectly or through symbolism. He normally writes about himself too.

The main character, in some way, is usually he. I believe that having a rough childhood and not the best of luck with the ladies left Hemingway without anyone to talk to. After witnessing so much death and destruction, he couldn't just keep that all bottled up inside. So I think that his stories that are about the war, is his way of getting all of this death and destruction off of his chest. It is a way for him to talk about what he went through. Take his story "Big Two Hearted River" for example.

That story right there is about himself. He was expressing how he feels through Nick. In this story, the character, nick, describes the town he sees as burned over, and all of the buildings burnt right down to their chipped foundation, nothing was left. What Hemingway was describing here is the war, but in a way his own self, his soul.

He had been burnt down, right to his chipped foundation. Hemingway uses the character Nick to represent himself. Hemingway writes stories with Nick, using it as a way to heal, a way to get all of these feelings he has from the war to the surface. Hemingway knows that he can't be totally hurt by the war, he knows that there has to be something left in him and that is what e is looking for. Hemingway, like many other authors, uses symbols in his stories. Since most of his stories are tied in with his war experience, so are his symbols.

Take the symbols in "Big Two Hearted River" for example. One symbol is his bags. They are heavy too heavy, but yet he still carries them in his shoulders. This symbolizes the pain the he carries with him from the war. The trees are another symbol in this story. Everywhere in this story he sees tree after tree after tree.

These represent the soldiers he would be seeing if he were still in the war. The grasshoppers are another symbol. They are black and corrupted by their surroundings, they also represent soldiers in the war. The river is also another symbol. The river is silent and fast moving.

It is deep and clear, rocky and sandy on the bottom, it is cold. The river represents life. Some points in life are clear, some are cloudy. Life is cold and not easy, sometimes rocky and sandy. The river washes away sins, it washes away the war. Obviously the war had a huge affect on Hemingway and his writing.

Many of his stories dealt with the war and his struggle to heal himself, both mentally and physically, after the war. Also, I believe that his childhood affected his writing. If he would have had a 'good' childhood, when he returned from the war he would have had someone to talk to. He would have had his mother or father to talk to, to talk about all of the horror that he witnessed all of the death that he was exposed to. If he would have had someone to talk to, he would have got all of that off of his shoulders and he wouldn't have had to write about Nick to heal himself. So possibly, "Big Two Hearted River" could have never been wrote.

Also, by looking at it this way, I would also have to say that his lack of luck with the ladies also had something to do with the way he wrote. For one women never really play any big or important roles in his stories, and secondly if he did have a 'good' wife, that would have been another person for him to talk to. Without a wife or companion and parents to talk to, Hemingway used his stories to get the burden of war off of his shoulders. Hemingway had a specific style in which he wrote. When Hemingway started working for the Toronto Star Weekly his boss gave him a list of dos and don " ts. "Use short sentences.

Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous Eng-list" were three things that appeared on this list that Hemingway would remember and later on in his writing career establish them as "the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing". This writing ethic was used by Hemingway and reinforced to him through lessons he learned from the works and advice of T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. Hemingway had a very modernist approach to writing. Part of this was he left out all extraneous verbiage and authorial intrusion. Instead he presented sharply focused images that stood out on their own.

Hemingway also developed a writing discipline. He would write one thousand words a day and refine the copy back to around three hundred words. He did not want to bore the reader with a bunch of nonsense and rambling on. Ernest Hemingway was a great American author. His stories were written about and through personal experiences. His stories directly reflected on his personal experiences and indirectly reflected on his unhappy childhood and his misfortune with the ladies.

He had his own style and own ways of keeping that style up. He was a great man.

Bibliography

All Hemingway. web's = style Hemingway, Ernest". The Big Two Hearted River". 1953.