Biography
Earnest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He was the first son and second child of Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemmingway and Grace Hall Hemingway. He excelled both academically and athletically. After displaying particular talent in his English classes, his first writing experience was writing for his school’s newspaper and yearbook.
Looking into Hemingway’s home life is very fascinating. He grew up with a dominant and narrowly religious mother following the Protestant faith. Hemingway later was quoted as saying these views contained “wide lawns and narrow minds”. An interesting aspect of Hemingway’s mother had relentlessly aspired to have twins. Not accepting failure, she dressed young Earnest and his sister Marcelline in similar clothes and hairstyles. After learning about this childhood experience, some biographers have suggested that Grace Hemingway further “feminized” her first son by referring to him as Ernestine. Though many infants and toddlers of the Victorian middle-class were often dressed as females, links can be made perhaps from many themes in Hemingway’s works that point to destructive interactions between male and female relationships.
Genres most associated with Hemingway include war and romance. His distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, which had a significant influence on twentieth-century fiction writing development. On a personal level, he was proud of his manhood, his capacity for drinking, and his talents as a fisherman, map reader, wing shot and poet. In his adult life, Hemingway was plagued with insomnia and violet mood swings and eventually became an unpredictable manic-depressive.
Three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, Earnest Hemingway took his own life with a shotgun on the morning of July 2, 1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. He was buried in a Roman Catholic service as Hemingway was judged not mentally responsible for his final act. The influence of Hemingway’s writings on American literature was considerable and continues to this very day, as he also affected writers within his modernist literary circle in his own time. Some of Hemingway’s more notable honors are the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
WWI and Hemingway
Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months and made efforts to join the United States Army, against his father’s wishes, in order to see action in World War I. Due to poor vision, he failed the medical examination and joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps instead. While en route to the Italian front, Hemingway tried to get as close to combat as possible when stopping in Paris, which was under constant bombardment from German artillery.
Soon after his arrival to the Italian Front, Hemingway witnessed the harsh brutalities of the war. First hand, Life-changing encounters with death left him shaken. On July 8, 1918, he was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, in which an Austrian trench mortar shell hit him, leaving fragments in his leg. This episode ultimately ended his career as an ambulance driver and resulted in his receiving the Silver Medal of Military Valor from the Italian government. Hemingway was awarded this honor for dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety, in spite of his own injuries.
Earnest subsequently worked in an American Red Cross hospital in Milan. Unfortunately, lack of entertainment not only led to newspaper reading to pass time, but also to heavy drinking. From a romantic standpoint, Hemingway met Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington D.C., a nurse more than six years his senior. He fell in love with her but their relationship sadly did not survive his return to the US. Instead of following Hemingway to America as planned, she became romantically involved with an Italian officer. The consequential and detrimental marks on his psyche eventually provided Hemingway with inspiration for one of his early, heavily autobiographical novels, A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929.
Influential Style and Historical Connections
Like any good writer, it is essential to be a keen observer of human behavior. It is noted that Hemingway claimed the ability to leave a crowded room with a picture of everyone in that room locked in his mind. His economical writing style often comes off as simplistic and almost childlike yet his method is deliberate and used to complex effect. As many may have altering opinions of Hemingway’s style, it’s argued equally as both madness and pure genius. Hemingway believed that an author who writes about a familiar subject is moreover capable of writing avidly and genuinely; thus, lacking this knowledge would result in the writer’s work to be flawed, as the reader would sense the author’s lack of expertise. The correlation between this approach and A Farewell to Arms, due to his involvement in WWI, can undoubtedly be distinguished, and therefore sheds light on Hemingway’s motivation and inspiration for this esteemed piece of literature.
Earnest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He was the first son and second child of Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemmingway and Grace Hall Hemingway. He excelled both academically and athletically. After displaying particular talent in his English classes, his first writing experience was writing for his school’s newspaper and yearbook.
Looking into Hemingway’s home life is very fascinating. He grew up with a dominant and narrowly religious mother following the Protestant faith. Hemingway later was quoted as saying these views contained “wide lawns and narrow minds”. An interesting aspect of Hemingway’s mother had relentlessly aspired to have twins. Not accepting failure, she dressed young Earnest and his sister Marcelline in similar clothes and hairstyles. After learning about this childhood experience, some biographers have suggested that Grace Hemingway further “feminized” her first son by referring to him as Ernestine. Though many infants and toddlers of the Victorian middle-class were often dressed as females, links can be made perhaps from many themes in Hemingway’s works that point to destructive interactions between male and female relationships.
Genres most associated with Hemingway include war and romance. His distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, which had a significant influence on twentieth-century fiction writing development. On a personal level, he was proud of his manhood, his capacity for drinking, and his talents as a fisherman, map reader, wing shot and poet. In his adult life, Hemingway was plagued with insomnia and violet mood swings and eventually became an unpredictable manic-depressive.
Three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, Earnest Hemingway took his own life with a shotgun on the morning of July 2, 1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. He was buried in a Roman Catholic service as Hemingway was judged not mentally responsible for his final act. The influence of Hemingway’s writings on American literature was considerable and continues to this very day, as he also affected writers within his modernist literary circle in his own time. Some of Hemingway’s more notable honors are the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
WWI and Hemingway
Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months and made efforts to join the United States Army, against his father’s wishes, in order to see action in World War I. Due to poor vision, he failed the medical examination and joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps instead. While en route to the Italian front, Hemingway tried to get as close to combat as possible when stopping in Paris, which was under constant bombardment from German artillery.
Soon after his arrival to the Italian Front, Hemingway witnessed the harsh brutalities of the war. First hand, Life-changing encounters with death left him shaken. On July 8, 1918, he was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, in which an Austrian trench mortar shell hit him, leaving fragments in his leg. This episode ultimately ended his career as an ambulance driver and resulted in his receiving the Silver Medal of Military Valor from the Italian government. Hemingway was awarded this honor for dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety, in spite of his own injuries.
Earnest subsequently worked in an American Red Cross hospital in Milan. Unfortunately, lack of entertainment not only led to newspaper reading to pass time, but also to heavy drinking. From a romantic standpoint, Hemingway met Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington D.C., a nurse more than six years his senior. He fell in love with her but their relationship sadly did not survive his return to the US. Instead of following Hemingway to America as planned, she became romantically involved with an Italian officer. The consequential and detrimental marks on his psyche eventually provided Hemingway with inspiration for one of his early, heavily autobiographical novels, A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929.
Influential Style and Historical Connections
Like any good writer, it is essential to be a keen observer of human behavior. It is noted that Hemingway claimed the ability to leave a crowded room with a picture of everyone in that room locked in his mind. His economical writing style often comes off as simplistic and almost childlike yet his method is deliberate and used to complex effect. As many may have altering opinions of Hemingway’s style, it’s argued equally as both madness and pure genius. Hemingway believed that an author who writes about a familiar subject is moreover capable of writing avidly and genuinely; thus, lacking this knowledge would result in the writer’s work to be flawed, as the reader would sense the author’s lack of expertise. The correlation between this approach and A Farewell to Arms, due to his involvement in WWI, can undoubtedly be distinguished, and therefore sheds light on Hemingway’s motivation and inspiration for this esteemed piece of literature.
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