Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway example essay topic

Ernest (Miller) Hemingway 1899-1961 Entry Updated: 08/01/2001 Birth Place: Oak Park, Illinois, United States Death Place: Ketchum, Idaho, United States Personal InformationCareerWritingsMedia AdaptationsSidelightsFurther Readings About the Author Personal Information: Family: Born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park Illinois, United States; committed suicide, July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho, United States son of Clarence Edmunds (a physician) and Grace (a music teacher; maiden name, Hall) Hemingway: married Hadley Richardson, September 3, 1921 (divorced March 10, 1927); married Pauline Pfeiffer (a writer), May 10, 1927 (divorced November 4, 1940); married Martha Gell horn (a writer), November 21, 1940 (divorced December 21, 1945); married Mary Welsh (a writer), March 14, 1946; children: (first marriage) John Hadley Nica nor; (second marriage) Patrick, Gregory. Education: Educated in Oak Park, IL. Career: Writer, 1917-61. Kansas City Star, Kansas City, MO, cub reporter, 1917-18; ambulance driver for Red Cross Ambulance Corps in Italy, 1918-19; Co-operative Commonwealth, Chicago, writer, 1920-21; Toronto Star, Toronto, Ontario, covered Greco-Turkish War, 1920, European correspondent, 1921-24; covered Spanish Civil War for North American Newspaper Alliance, 1937-38; war correspondent in China, 1941; war correspondent in Europe, 1944-45. Awards: Pulitzer Prize, 1953, for The Old Man and the Sea; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1954; Award of Merit from American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1954. WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR: NOVELS The Torrents of Spring: A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of Great Race (parody), Scribner, 1926, published with a new introduction by David Garnett, J. Cape, 1964, reprinted, Scribner, 1972.

The Sun Also Rises, Scribner, 1926, published with a new introduction by Henry Seidel Canby, Modern Library, 1930, reprinted, Scribner, 1969 (published in England as Fiesta, J. Cape, 1959). A Farewell to Arms, Scribner, 1929, published with new introduction's by Ford Madox Ford, Modern Library, 1932, Robert Penn Warren, Scribner, 1949, John C. Schweitzer, Scribner, 1967. To Have and Have Not, Scribner, 1937, J. Cape, 1970. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Scribner, 1940, published with a new introduction by Sinclair Lewis, Princeton University Press, 1942, reprinted, Scribner, 1960. Across the River and Into the Trees, Scribner, 1950, reprinted, Penguinwith J. Cape, 1966. The Old Man and the Sea, Scribner 1952.

Islands in the Stream, Scribner, 1970. The Garden of Eden, Scribner, 1986. Patrick Hemingway, editor, True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, Simon & Schuster, 1999. SHORT STORIES, EXCEPT AS INDICATED Three Stories & Ten Poems, Contact (Paris), 1923. In Our Time, Boni & Liveright, 1925, published with additional material and new introduction by Edmund Wilson, Scribner, 1930, reprinted, Bruccoli, 1977 (also see below). Men Without Women, Scribner, 1927.

Winner Take Nothing, Scribner, 1933. Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (stories and a play), Scribner, 1938, stories published separately as First Forty-nine Stories, J. Cape, 1962, play published separately as The Fifth Column: A Play in Three Acts, Scribner, 1940, J. Cape, 1968 (also see below). The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Scribner, 1938. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, Scribner, 1961. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories, Penguin, 1963. Hemingway's African Stories: The Stories, Their Sources, Their Critics, compiled by John M. Howell, Scribner, 1969.

The Nick Adams Stories, preface by Philip Young, Scribner, 1972. (Contributor) Peter Griffin, Along With Youth (biography that includes five previously unpublished short stories: Crossroads, The Mercenaries, The Ash-Heel's Tendon, The Current, and Portrait of the Idealist in Love), Oxford University Press, 1985. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigil Edition, Scribner, 1987. OTHER in our time (miniature sketches), Three Mountain Press (Paris), 1924 (also see above). Today Is Friday (pamphlet), As Stable Publications (Englewood, N.J. ), 1926. Death in the Afternoon (nonfiction), Scribner, 1932.

God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, House of Books, 1933. Green Hills of Africa (nonfiction), Scribner, 1935, reprinted, Penguinwith J. Cape, 1966. The Spanish Earth (commentary and film narration), introduction by Jasper Wood, J.B. Savage (Cleveland, Ohio), 1938. The Spanish War (monograph), Fact, 1938. (Editor and author of introduction) Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (based on a plan by William Kozlenko), Crown, 1942. Voyage to Victory, Crowell-Collier, 1944.

The Secret Agent's Badge of Courage, Belmont Books, 1954. Two Christmas Tales, Hart Press, 1959. A Moveable Feast (reminiscences), Scribner, 1964. Collected Poems, Haskell, 1970.

The Collected Poems of Ernest Hemingway, Gordon Press, 1972. Ernest Hemingway: Eighty-Eight Poems, Harcourt, 1979. Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961, Scribner, 1981. Complete Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Hemingway on Writing, Scribner, 1984. The Dangerous Summer (nonfiction), introduction by James A. Michener, Scribner, 1985.

Conversations With Ernest Hemingway, University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Hemingway at Oak Park High: The High School Writings of Ernest Hemingway, 1916-1917 Alpine Guild, 1993. Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway / Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925-1947, Scribner, 1996. OMNIBUS VOLUMES The Portable Hemingway (contains The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and short stories), edited by Malcolm Cowley, Viking, 1944. The Essential Hemingway (contains one novel, novel extracts, and twenty-three short stories), J. Cape, 1947, reprinted, 1964.

The Hemingway Reader, edited with foreword by Charles Poore, Scribner, 1953. Three Novels: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea, each with separate introduction's by Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren, and Carlos Baker, respectively, Scribner, 1962. The Wild Years (collection of journalism), edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan, Dell, 1962. By-line, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, edited by William White, Scribner, 1967.

Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War, Scribner, 1969 (also see above). Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter: Kansas City Star Stories, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. Ernest Hemingway's Apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916-1917, edited by Bruccoli, Bruccoli Clark NCR Microcar d Editions, 1971. The Enduring Hemingway: An Anthology of a Lifetime in Literature, edited by Charles Scribner, Jr., Scribner, 1974. Dateline -- Toronto: Hemingway's Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, edited by White, Scribner, 1985.

The Short Stories, Scribner, 1997. Media Adaptations: Several of Hemingway's works have been adapted for motion pictures, including For Whom the Bell Tolls; To Have and Have Not; The Sun Also Rises, screenplay by Peter Viertel, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1956; A Farewell to Arms, screenplay by Ben Hecht, The Selznick Co., 1957; and The Old Man and the Sea, screenplay by Peter Viertel, Warner Bros., 1957. The Snows of Kilimanjaro: A Full-length Play, based on Hemingway " short story, was written by Bryan Patrick Harnetiaux, Dramatic Publications (Woodstock, IL), 1995. 'Sidelights'The writer's job is to tell the truth,' Ernest Hemingway once said. When he was having difficulty writing he reminded himself of this, as he explained in his memoirs, A Moveable Feast. 'I would stand and lookout over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry.

You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. ' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.

' Hemingway's personal and artistic quests for truth were directly related. As Earl Rov it noted: 'More often than not, Hemingway's fictions seem rooted in his journeys into himself much more clearly and obsessively than is usually the case with major fiction writers... His writing was his way of approaching his identity -- of discovering himself in the projected metaphors of his experience. He believed that if he could see himself clear and whole, his vision might be useful to others who also lived in this world. ' The public's acquaintance with the personal life of Hemingway was perhaps greater than with any other modern novelist. He was well known as a sportsman and bon vivant and his escapades were covered in such popular magazines as Life and Esquire.

Hemingway became a legendary figure, wrote John W. Aldridge, 'a kind of twentieth-century Lord Byron; and like Byron, he had learned to play himself, his own best hero, with superb conviction. Hew as Hemingway of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing beside a marlin he had just landed or a lion he had just shot; he was Tarzan Hemingway, crouching in the African bush with elephant gun at ready, Bwana Hemingway commanding his native bearers in terse Swahili; he was War Correspondent Hemingway writing a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty Fascist shells crashed through the roof; later on he was Task Force Hemingway swathed in ammunition belts and defending his post singlehanded against fierce German attacks. ' Anthony Burgess declared: 'Reconciling literature and action, he fulfilled for all writers, the sickroom dream of leaving the desk for the arena, and then returning to the desk. He wrote good and lived good, and both activities were the same.

The pen handled with the accuracy of the rifle; sweat and dignity; bags of co jones. ' Hemingway's search for truth and accuracy of expression is reflected in his terse, economical prose style, which is widely acknowledged to be his greatest contribution to literature. What Frederick J. Hoffman called Hemingway's'esthetic of simplicity' involves a 'basic struggle for absolute accuracy in making words correspond to experience. ' For Hemingway, William Barrett commented, 'style was a moral act, a desperate struggle for moral probity amid the confusions of the world and the slippery complexities of one " sown nature. To set things down simple and right is to hold a standard of rightness against a deceiving world. ' In a discussion of Hemingway's style, Sheldon Norman Grebstein listed these characteristics: 'first, short and simple sentence constructions, with heavy use of parallelism, which convey the effect of control, terseness, and blunt honesty; second, purged diction which above all eschews the use of bookish, latinate, or abstract words and thus achieves the effect of being heard or spoken or transcribed from reality rather than appearing as a construct of the imagination (in brief, verisimilitude); and third, skillful use of repetition and a kind of verbal counterpoint, which operate either by pairing or juxtaposing opposites, or else by running the same word or phrase through a series of shifting meanings and inflections.

' One of Hemingway's greatest virtues as a writer was his self-discipline. He described how he accomplished this in A Moveable Feast. 'If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scroll work or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written... I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline. ' His early training in journalism as a reporter for the Kansas City Star and the Toronto Star is often mentioned as a factor in the development of his lean style.

Later, as a foreign correspondent he learned the even more rigorously economic language of 'cables e,' in which each word must convey the meaning of several others. While Hemingway acknowledged his debt to journalism in Death in the Afternoon by commenting that 'in writing for a newspaper you told what happened and with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day,' he admitted that the hardest part of fiction writing, 'the real thing,' was contriving 'the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always. ' Although Hemingway has named numerous writers as his literary influences, his contemporaries mentioned most often in this regard are Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. Malcolm Cowley assessed the importance of Stein and Pound (who were both friends of Hemingway) to his literary development, while stressing that the educational relationship was mutual.

'One thing he took partly from her [Stein] was a colloquial -- in appearance -- American style, full of repeated words, prepositional phrases, and present participles, the style in which he wrote his early published stories. One thing he took from Pound -- in return for trying vainly to teach him to box -- was the doctrine of the accurate image, which he applied in the 'chapters' printed between the stories that went into In Our Time; but Hemingway also learned from him to blue pencil most of his adjectives. ' Hemingway has commented that he learned how to write as much from painters as from other writers. Cezanne was one of his favorite painters and Wright Morris has compared Hemingway's stylistic method to that of Cezanne. 'Cezanne-like simplicity of scene is built up with the touches of a master, and the great effects are achieved with a sublime economy.

At these moments style and substance are of one piece, each growing from the other, and one cannot imagine that life could exist except as described. We think only of what is there, and not, as in the less successful moments, of all of the elements of experience that are not. ' While most critics have found Hemingway's prose exemplary (Jackson J. Benson claimed that he had 'perhaps the best ear that has ever been brought to the creation of English prose'), Leslie A. Fiedler complained that Hemingway learned to write 'through the eye rather than the ear. If his language is colloquial, it is written colloquial, for he was constitutionally incapable of hearing English as it was spoken around him. To a critic who once asked him why his characters all spoke alike, Hemingway answered, 'Because In ever listen to anybody. ' ' Hemingway's earlier novels and short stories were largely praised for their unique style.

Paul Goodman, for example, was pleased with the 'sweetness " of the writing in A Farewell to Arms. 'When it [sweetness] appears, the short sentences coalesce and flow, and sing -- sometimes melancholy, sometimes pastoral, sometimes personally embarrassed in an adult, not adolescent, way. In the dialogues, he pays loving attention to the spoken word. Andthe writing is meticulous; he is sweetly devoted to writing well. Most everything else is resigned, but here he makes an effort, and the effort produces lovely moments. ' But in his later works, particularly Across the River and Into the Trees and the posthumously published Islands in the Stream, the Hemingway style degenerated into near self-parody.

'In the best of early Hemingway it always seemed that if exactly the right words in exactly the right order were not chosen, something monstrous would occur, an unimaginably delicate internal warning system would be thrown out of adjustment, and some principle of personal and artistic integrity would be fatally compromised,' John Aldridge wrote. 'But by the time he came to write The Old Man and the Sea there seems to have been nothing at stake except the professional obligation to sound as much like Hemingway as possible. The man had disappeared behind the mannerism, the artist behind the artifice, and all that was left was coldly flawless facade of words. ' Foster Hirsch found that Hemingway's'mawkish self-consciousness is especially evident in Islands in the Stream. ' Across the River and Into the Trees, according to Philip Rah v, 'reads like a parody by the author of his own manner -- a parody so biting that it virtually destroys the mixed social and literary legend of Hemingway. ' And Carlos Baker wrote: 'In the lesser works of his final years... nostalgia drove him to the point of exploiting his personal idiosyncrasies, as if he hoped to persuade readers to accept these in lieu of that powerful union of objective discernment and subjective response which he had once be enable to achieve.

' But Hemingway was never his own worst imitator. He was perhaps the most influential writer of his generation and scores of writers, particularly the hard-boiled writers of the thirties, attempted to adapt his tough, understated prose to their own works, usually without success. As ClintonS. Bur hans, Jr., noted: 'The famous and extraordinarily eloquent concreteness of Hemingway's style is inimitable precisely because it is not primarily stylistic: the how of Hemingway's style is the what of his characteristic vision. ' It is this organicism, the skillful blend of style and substance, that made Hemingway's works so successful, despite the fact that many critics have complained that he lacked vision.

Hemingway avoided intellectualism because he thought it shallow and pretentious. His unique vision demanded the expression of emotion through the description of action rather than of passive thought. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained, 'Was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion you experienced. ' Even morality, for Hemingway, was a consequence of action and emotion. He stated his moral code in Death in the Afternoon: 'What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. ' Lady Brett Ashley, in The Sun Also Rises, voices this pragmatic morality after she has decided to leave a young bullfighter, believing the break to be in his best interests.

She says: 'You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch... It's sort of what we have instead of God. ' Hemingway's perception of the world as devoid of traditional values and truths and instead marked by disillusionment and moribund idealism, isa characteristically twentieth-century vision. World War I was a watershed for Hemingway and his generation. As an ambulance driver in the Italian infantry, Hemingway had been severely wounded. The war experience affected him profoundly, as he told Malcolm Cowley.

'In the first war I was hurt very badly; in the body, mind, and spirit, and also morally. ' The heroes of his novels were similarly wounded. According to Max Westbrook they 'awake to a world gone to hell. World War I has destroyed belief in the goodness of national governments. The depression has isolated man from his natural brotherhood. Institutions, concepts, and insidious groups of friends and ways of life are, when accurately seen, a tyranny, a sentimental or.

' Both of Hemingway's first two major novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, were 'primarily descriptions of a society that had lost the possibility of belief. They were dominated by an atmosphere of Gothic ruin, boredom, sterility and decay,' John Aldridge wrote. 'Yet if they had been nothing more than descriptions, they would inevitably have been as empty of meaning as the thing they were describing. ' While Alan Leibowitz contended that because the theme of despair 'is always an end in itself, the fiction merely its transcription, ... it is a dead end,' Aldridge believed that Hemingway managed to save the novels by salvaging the characters' values and transcribing them 'into a kind of moral network that linked them together in a unified pattern of meaning. ' In the search for meaning Hemingway's characters necessarily confront violence. Omnipresent violence is a fact of existence, according to Hemingway.

Even in works such as The Sun Also Rises in which violence plays a minimal role, it is always present subliminally -- 'woven into the structure of life itself,' William Barrett remarked. In other works violence is more obtrusive: the wars in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the hostility of nature which is particularly evident in the short stories, and the violent sports such as bullfighting and big game hunting that are portrayed in numerous works. 'Hemingway is the dramatist of the extreme situation. His overriding theme is honour, personal honour: by what shall a man live, by what shall a man die, in a world the essential condition of whose being is violence?' Walter Allen wrote. 'These problems are posed rather than answered in his first book In Our Time, a collection of short stories in which almost all of Hemingway's later work is contained by implication. ' The code by which Hemingway's heroes must live (Philip Young has termed them 'code heroes') is contingent on the qualities of courage, self-control, and 'grace under pressure.

' Irving Howe has described the typical Hemingway hero as a man 'who is wounded but bears his wounds in silence, who is defeated but finds a remnant of dignity in an honest confrontation of defeat. ' Furthermore, the hero's great desire must be to 'salvage from the collapse of social life a version of stoicism that can make suffering bearable; the hope that in direct physical sensation, the cold water of the creek in which one fishes or the purity of the wine made by Spanish peasants, there can be found an experience that can resist corruption. ' Hemingway has been accused of exploiting and sensationalizing violence. However, Leo Gur ko remarked that 'the motive behind Hemingway's heroic figures is not glory, or fortune, or the righting of injustice, or the thirst for experience. They are inspired neither by vanity nor ambition nor a desire.