The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber | Ernest Hemingway Biography

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century. His rugged lifestyle and terse, penetrating prose have inspired generations of imitators. As much as for his writing, he is known for his adventurous personality and love of the outdoors. He was an avid fisherman and hunter, a firsthand witness of many wars, and a bullfighting aficionado. He was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, where he was raised. His childhood experiences in the woods of Michigan, where his family owned a summer home, contributed to several of his most famous stories which feature the character Nick Adams. After graduating from high school in 1917, where he had contributed a weekly column to the school newspaper and contributed fiction to the school’s magazine, he went to work for the Kansas City Star. Many attribute his terse writing style to his experience as a journalist.

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway was an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I and received shrapnel wounds on his legs. He married for the first time in 1921—the first of four trips to the altar—and returned to Europe to begin his career as a writer of fiction. For the next forty years, he published numerous short stories and novels, among the most famous of which are the short stories “Hills Like White Elephants,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and the novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). A memoir of sorts was published in 1964 as A Moveable Feast, in which he related many of his early experiences in Paris during the 1920s when the city was a haven for American expatriate artists and writers. Hemingway and his cohorts, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford among them, are sometimes called the “Lost Generation” because of their cynical view of life forged in the modernist era between the world wars.

Though primarily known as a writer of fiction, he continued throughout his life to function as a journalist, covering several wars, including the Greco-Turkish War in 1920 and the Spanish Civil War from 1937-38. In 1944, he served as a reporter and paramilitary aide during the liberation of France. In 1953 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Old Man and the Sea. He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature but did not attend the ceremony to accept the prize. In 1960, after suffering a mental breakdown, he entered the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to undergo electroshock therapy. He committed suicide in 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho.

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